Fixing Quality Control Issues Is Easier Than You Think

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article |Quality Control|Fixing Quality Control Issues Is Easier Than You ThinkFor a lot of companies, quality control is a substantial issue. As any executive will tell you, there’s a tremendous difference between producing a hundred products well and tens of thousands. Often you have to rely on entirely different processes. And that’s where the problem lies: making the transition to a new way of doing things isn’t easy.

Quality control has always been important, but in today’s market, it is essential. If there are issues, customers will moan about them in online reviews and cause your ratings to crater. Prospects will then see these reviews and give your brand a wide berth. That’s not what you want.

Excellent oversight over product quality begins at the top of the organization. If you make it a priority of yours, then it will trickle down to everyone else and change the way that they approach business. Fundamentally, you need a more detail-orientated company. So what should you do? Let’s take a look.

Make Quality An Aspirational Goal, Not Something Oppressive

Most companies want to achieve a high level of quality in everything that they do. That’s understandable. But a lot of firms take it too far, turning the pursuit of excellence into a form of oppression that undermines their efforts.

The current system of quality control has removed the fun factor from a lot of companies. Every day becomes a kind of dreary slog where nobody ever has the confidence to branch out and try something new. It creates a suffocating environment where everyone is terrified of being innovative and introducing ideas, just in case it has some unwanted knock-on effect.

Performance reviews are a case in point. A lot of managers will sit back and evaluate employees on their mistakes alone, instead of looking at the other side of the equation: the business that they won. This negativity changes people’s behavior. Instead of thinking about what they could do to make the company better, they’re consumed by thoughts of how to prevent negative evaluations at their performance review. And this hinders any independent activity in a way that hurts business.

Fixing people-related quality control issues, therefore, should be about reframing workplace activities. Management should sell workers’ tasks as noble, exciting, and worthwhile. People aren’t machines, but how you sell their roles can contribute enormously to their overall pursuit of quality. Plus, by reframing performance, you provide them with scope to bring new ideas that could make your business better.

Introduce Voluntary Quality Circles

Quality circles are a dated idea that came out of Japanese corporations in the 1970s. Even though they have fallen out of fashion, they’re not defunct. In reality, they’re one of the most powerful tools at your disposal to improve your output.

The critical factor here is that these organizations should be voluntary. You want to attract people with intrinsic motivation to help the company and place it firmly on the straight and narrow.

Give the people who volunteer exclusive authority to evaluate and review processes at every stage of your operation. Task them with creating reporting structures that allow them to collect information and set their agendas. Once you have the system in place, give members the freedom to experiment with different approaches and styles, even if you wouldn’t adopt them yourself. This way, you may be able to address concerns and track defects in ways that you couldn’t before.

Make Your Quality Control Processes High-Tech And Sensor-Driven

Getting a human to check one hundred products for defects is a challenge. Doing the same for a thousand is almost impossible. Thus, any decent quality control process needs to make extensive use of technology.

The range of sensor options available today is nothing short of extraordinary, and they’re becoming integrated into company networks. For instance, you can use a WiFi temperature sensor in a cold storage room to send alerts to employees via their devices instead of having to check it manually. In other words, you can get a heads up that there’s a problem with your refrigeration the moment that temperatures rise.

There are all types of other sensors you can use too. For instance, internet-enabled vibration sensors allow you to detect whether plant and equipment require maintenance. And motion detection sensors can indicate whether your production floor is within predefined parameters.

With the development of the internet of things, this type of quality control methodology will become increasingly popular. Companies will be able to rely on sensors instead of physical inspections to alert them to issues in the production process. Managers will be able to step in, evaluate the situation from a distance, and then schedule maintenance or product distribution reviews before the loss of stock or capital.

Get Experienced Employees To Train New Staff

When it comes to quality control, training is essential. But the type you choose can have remarkable, knock-on effects on the performance of your business.

A lot of managers and executives see quality control issues and then come to believe that they need to bring in outside trainers. Those with many years of experience in business, however, rarely take this route. The problem is that external trainers don’t have a full appreciation of your internal processes. They might understand the principles of quality control, but they don’t fully grasp the practice of it in your specific firm.

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article |Quality Control|Fixing Quality Control Issues Is Easier Than You ThinkSome CEOs, like Ari Weinzweig, recommend, therefore, that you do the training in-house, using more experienced colleagues to instruct the new starters. Often they know far more about the quality issues in your company than trainers or even senior management. Being on the ground gives them a clear view of the problems that the company faces and possible solutions.

Again, you’re going to have to trust in the better judgment of your people. If they see a problem and find a way to fix it, then you sometimes need to take a deep breath and let them get on with it.

Training should also occur at all levels of the organization, not just at the grassroots level. Mangers up the hierarchy also need a broad-level overview of how your company intends to approach quality issues in the future. Everyone needs to understand how they slot into the network of relationships that will ensure that customers get an excellent service.

Automate Your Quality Control

If there’s a specific person or process that is causing quality control issues in your organization, then automation probably won’t help much. If, however, you’re relying on manual reviews when you don’t need to, then there are probably opportunities for improvement.

The vast majority of quality control is repetitive. Workers on a production line might stand next to a conveyor belt all day long, looking for telltale defects that will make products unsuitable for market. While this kind of work is essential, it is also error-prone and can lead to a bad online reputation.

The solution here is to automate what you can and then augment your systems with real people. By doing this, you reduce the chance of human error and make up for the failings of the machinery. Remember, it too will make mistakes. You need people and automated systems working together if you want to see a step-change in quality.

Adjust Your Hiring Process

While there’s a widespread belief that we’re all equal, any executive knows that this is not the case. Twenty percent of your workers create eighty percent of the value.

Adjusting your hiring processes, therefore, can radically change the makeup of your firm and point it in the direction of quality.

But what does hiring competent people look like in this scenario?

Mainly, you’re looking for people with a level of conscientiousness. You want a team of individuals who will diligently go about their work and “sweat the small stuff.” You don’t want broad-brush people who will ship something, even when they know there’s a glaring problem.

At the same time, you don’t want to hire people who can’t break out from their process-driven box and make decisions for themselves. Fundamentally, you want a team of diligent innovators.

Your hiring process, therefore, should reflect this. You want to test candidates’ ability to not only sniff out problems but solve them with bright ideas. Monitor their commitment to quality. It will make a difference.

Prepare Yourself For Conflict

Whenever you make a change to your business model in pursuit of higher quality, it will create conflict. There will always be some losers: people who either have to up their game or get out. For that reason, executives often need to take a deep breath before taking on this fight. It is not easy.

Businesses that view quality as a single, non-negotiable goal typically have the best outcomes. Those that prioritize other things – such as quarterly revenue generation – encourage managers and staff to make tradeoffs.

Conflict, therefore, inevitably arises whenever anyone tries to increase quality. It is not just about making sure that the product is in good condition when it reaches the customers. It is also about changing the mission of your firm at a basic level. And not everyone will appreciate that.

A Quick Beginners Guide To Analytics in 2020

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Analytics|A Quick Beginners Guide To Analytics in 2020If you know anything about analytics, it’s probably that you should be looking at them regularly to decipher what is working for your business and what isn’t. Using these stats and figures, you can make sure that your business is always doing the right thing and can get the best results. The only thing is, many people don’t think that analytics are all that easy to understand. In fact, they can be quite intimidating.

Below, we’ll talk you through a few things quickly so you can have a better idea of what you should be looking at:

Is It Free?

There are multiple ways you can check your analytics. Google Analytics, for example, has both paid and free versions. If you are a small or medium sized business, then you should be fine with the free version. You will get more support with the paid version, however. Start by creating your account and add the URL and industry, as well as the name of the site you’d like to track. You will then get your custom code that you add after the head tag of your site.

You can check it’s all working by visiting the “Real-Time reports” section while clicking around on your site in a different tab or on your phone. You only need to add the tag to every page template, not every individual page on your site.

Other Kinds Of Analytics

Of course, there are other kinds of analytics that you should consider looking at depending on what kind of business you are. PetroBase is one such example – you can use this service to check your analytics in the oil and gas industry. There’s no one size fits all guide to checking analytics, which is why it’s so important to understand what is important to your own business.

Analytics That May Be Helpful To All Businesses/Industries

The Real Time Report

This tells you what is happening on your site right now, showing you visitors, the pages they are looking at, the platforms they came from, where they are, and so on. This is probably the least valuable metric to look at, so don’t be fooled into thinking you should have your eye on it constantly. Instead, you should be looking at useful analytics that pack a greater punch, such as whether a sale is driving conversions or whether a new blog post is bringing in traffic.

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures eBook


Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value can be assessed using the Lifetime Value report. This allows you to see those who are most valuable to your company. You can utilize this by ensuring you give incentives to valuable customers.

Behaviour Reports

This is a valuable report to use and one you should consider looking at frequently.

Landing Pages

This defines a landing page as the first page in a session, and the visitor’s first interaction with your website. If you’re interested in the sources such as organic, paid social, direct, etc, driving users to the landing page, you can add Source/Medium as a secondary dimension.

Site Speed

Tells you how quickly your site is loading for users. The faster the better!

What do you think you should be looking at for your business?

4 Easy Ways to Promote Your Business

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, 4 Easy Ways to Promote Your Business

No matter how excellent your product or service may be, it is impossible for you to achieve success as a business owner without customers. Competition in today’s market is fierce, and it can be difficult to set yourself apart from your competitors. Use these methods to promote your business and attract new clients.

Give Customers Vehicle Magnets with Your Logo

Most people love to receive free stuff, and you should take advantage of this fact in promoting your business. Use a company that sells custom vehicle magnets Austin TX and order a few hundred of them with your company’s logo. Then, when customers come in, give each one a magnet. As long as they have a good opinion of your business and you have an attractive logo, they will be inclined to put the magnet on their cars. People driving behind them in traffic or walking past their cars in the parking lot will notice the magnet and look up your business, and you will start to see new customers come through the door.

Advertise on Social Media

Many of your potential customers spend more time scrolling through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on their phones than they do watching TV or reading a newspaper. For just a few dollars, you can create an ad campaign that will target social media users in your general area. You can even customize your target demographics, so that people in a certain age range are more likely to see your ad.

Encourage Existing Customers to Help

Businesses with a large number of five-star reviews on Google, Yelp and other online platforms tend to attract more web traffic and higher numbers of new customers. One good way to get more people to rate and review your business is to offer a small incentive. For example, you could give each customer who completes a rating and review a $5 coupon or gift certificate.

Offer a Free Trial or Sample

Some of your potential customers have an interest in what your business has to offer, but would rather try your product or service before they buy. You can entice this subset of people by offering a free sample of your product or a chance to try out your service once for free.

Running and promoting a business at the same time demands lots of time and dedication. These strategies are easy and relatively inexpensive, and they will help you to attract new customers. Good luck with promoting your business!

A Fast – and Brutally Effective – Way to Make Your Organization More Innovative

StrategyDriven Innovation Article | A Fast – and Brutally Effective – Way to Make Your Organization More InnovativeStartups are good at innovation for many reasons, but the two most important ones are people and culture.

They attract people who are looking for a challenge and opt into taking risk in the pursuit of a potential, yet uncertain, upside. The successful ones create a culture that embraces problems as an opportunity to break the rules and find a better way. There are clear incentives to succeed and significant repercussions if you don’t – like losing your job. These organizations are often resource-limited, which creates an incredible focus on only doing what really matters.

They also fail at an incredibly high rate. According to the Startup Genome Project, more than 90 percent of startups fail. If you tried to do something with that failure rate at most established companies, you’d be fired. So what can you do?

One of the solutions that some larger companies have tried is to create an innovative startup within an existing business. This approach hasn’t had much success, as it’s far more complicated to implement than people think. These internal startups strive to be innovative, but tend to become more incremental. They’re limited by the people available to them and the culture of the parent organization.

The good news is that there’s a faster way to get innovation going: Eliminate all the jobs in your company with the title of vice president. This probably seems like a drastic step. But, if you want to innovate, you need to find the right people and create a culture that’s willing to embrace unconventional ideas and is unafraid of change. Keep in mind, culture isn’t defined by words; it’s the embodiment of your actions.

You can’t get serious about innovation until you’ve put these foundational pieces in place.

Substance over form

To get started, take your current organization chart and delete the vice president positions. You’ll still need some people to lead teams and organize work, but call these jobs what they really are: managers. If there’s an overlap between jobs with all the titles removed, it’s a great time to simplify things and get rid of any role that isn’t critical to achieving the goal. Fewer people results in a secondary benefit of smaller teams, which research has shown are much more innovative.

When you tell someone you’re eliminating their title, you’re forcing them to choose to derive their value from the work they do instead of what they’re called. You’re making them choose substance over form. If the title is so important that they can’t or won’t do their job without it, then they’ll get in the way of innovation. If they’re willing to quit over their job title, it’s highly unlikely they’ll embrace the culture required to pursue innovation and drive change. Innovation requires people that care more about what they do than what they’re called and can deal with the brutal truth.

Why target the VPs?

The VP title is a symbol of bureaucracy, which is the enemy of innovation.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a vice president is: “an officer next in rank to a president and usually empowered to serve as president in that officer’s absence or disability.”

That seems like an important role if something happens to the president, but if the U.S. government only needs one, why do companies need so many? They don’t, that’s the point.

It seems illogical that anyone would want the vice president title to begin with. You’re explicitly acknowledging that you’re not trusted to be in charge unless there’s an emergency. If you literally described the title on a business card it would read something like: “John Doe, Not really empowered.”

If someone wants that job, they’re not the right person to be on a team focused on innovation. You can’t have people waiting around to be empowered; they need to be motivated enough to empower themselves. In fact, if you’re going to pursue something that’s never been done before, you need people who are willing to hold themselves accountable for things outside their direct control.

As organizations evolve over time, you’ll likely be recruiting people from larger companies who feel they need titles to do their job. This is a warning sign that they’re not aligned with the innovation culture. You will hear the argument that titles are cheap; they don’t cost anything. But titles are more expensive than you can imagine; they can cost an organization its soul.

Beware of C-level fever

A new enemy in the title game is potentially more problematic than having too many vice presidents. In Russell Fleischer’s article for Fast Company, he talks about a “C-level fever” that’s not only affecting big companies, but startups as well. He points out that if everyone is a chief, no one really is.

Unlike vice presidents, the chief of something implies that someone is in charge, and when it comes to innovation, this can lead to two significant issues. Chiefs tend to like to make decisions, or at least to be consulted on decisions, which slow people down. They also tend to make themselves the focus of their team, when the focus needs to be on solving the next problem and finding the next idea. One of the keys to innovation is optimizing the people doing the work, not those sitting around talking about it. Limit the number of chief titles to those who need to be legally responsible (and potentially liable) for the actions of the company. When people understand that personal liability comes with the title, it tends to be an effective deterrent.

Innovation is hard, but only because we allow ourselves to make it complicated. Simplify your organization chart, find people who don’t need titles to feel empowered, and create a culture that insists on substance over form. You will be much more successful creating solutions to problems that other people believe can’t be solved.


About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Chuck SwobodaChuck Swoboda is Innovator-in-Residence at Marquette University, President of Cape Point Advisors and retired Chairman and CEO of Cree, Inc. He is co-inventor on more than 25 patents covering LEDs and lighting technology, and has over 30 years of experience in the technology business. Additionally, he is an author, speaker and host of the “Innovators on Tap” podcast. His new book is The Innovator’s Spirit: Discover the Mindset to Pursue the Impossible (Fast Company, May 5, 2020). Learn more at www.chuckswoboda.com.

Offshore Software Development: Reasons Why Outsourcing Is Beneficial For Startups

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Outsourcing| Offshore Software Development: Reasons Why Outsourcing Is Beneficial For StartupsOffshore outsourcing is a popular software development strategy in modern tech. From global corporations to nascent startups, more businesses consider looking for programmers abroad.

As a startup founder, you may be new to outsourcing and wonder why it has been so hyped lately. In this post, we will examine the benefits of choosing offshore mobile application development.

7 Reasons For Startup Owners To Outsource

The impact of outsourcing is especially evident for early-day startups that would otherwise struggle to hire skilled talent or complete their projects. Broadening the talent pool helps you get a fresh perspective on the project, ensure it appeals to international audiences, and, most importantly, cut development costs.

Let’s have a closer look at why startup owners should choose offshore application development services by examining their seven most impactful benefits.

1. Lower development costs

The startup field is highly competitive. According to statistics, out of all new businesses, only 10% make it past the early days. There are a lot of external factors you can’t control – the worldwide economic landscape, the demand for your service, or a powerful competitor that decided to penetrate the market.

To protect themselves from investments with no return, startup owners look for the cheapest ways to bring the project to the market and validate the idea.

The high potential of outsourcing as a cost-saver has to do with lower labor costs outside main tech hubs – US, EU, UK. Take a look at the average software developer salary in some countries worldwide:

  • US – $71,000
  • Germany – $52,600
  • South Africa – $23,750
  • Ukraine – $11,000

Data source: Payscale

The difference in salaries between American and Ukrainian developers is astonishing – thus, hiring professionals from regions with a lower median salary allows business owners to afford complex projects under a reasonable budget.

2. Flexibility

Hiring an in-house team is not the fittest strategy for a nascent startup founder – you will have people depending on you and salaries to pay. In case a project was not as successful as you had hoped, you’ll have to fire team members – that is definitely not a rewarding experience.

Similarly, if a project takes off unexpectedly and you lack the workforce to maintain it, expanding the team and filling in empty spots will be a time-consuming and expensive process.

Choosing outsourcing spares business owners all staffing trouble. Depending on your budget, ambitions, and the project’s performance you can scale the offshore development team up or down in just a couple of hours. Outsourcing teams typically have a pool of developers you can request anytime, without having to spend time on screening, interviewing, and onboarding hires on your own.

3. Higher personal efficiency

Managing a startup team is a full-time job that will not allow focusing on promotion, developing new product concepts, or researching the market. Instead, you will need to troubleshoot corporate misunderstandings, have regular conference calls, fill in tons of paperwork.

Outsourcing helps business owners stay focused on high-priority tasks – be it promotion, product design, or market research. An outsourcing team will be the one to manage the team, deal with taxation papers, and oversee product development.

4. Leveled playground

Small startup owners often struggle as they have to compete against well-oiled teams, with established toolsets, project management, and maintenance frameworks. While a business founder is finding his groove with the team, more experienced competitors build products much faster, maintain them better, are faster and more efficient in client communication.

By outsourcing, you can get experienced developers and project managers on board, while paying a junior developer salary. An offshore mobile application development team typically has years of product development experience, is familiar with the best industry practices and standards. Thus, by choosing to outsource, you decrease the quality gap between you and experienced competitors and ensure high user acceptance rates.

5. International perspective

Other than being a powerful time-and-cost-saver, outsourcing is a reasonable strategic decision for business owners targeting international audiences. By looking for developers abroad, you will be able to get different perspectives on the concept, make sure it resonates with people across the globe, and adopt the best of worldwide software development practices.

Outsourcing gives startup owners a better understanding of whether the product will get traction, which features are necessary according to international developers, and what some ways to market the product abroad will be. As a result, you will be more prepared to promote your product abroad and penetrate new markets.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, startup owners need to be mindful of how they allocate their budget and try to make the most out of every cent. Outsourcing is a lossless way to cut software development costs since you don’t compromise the product’s core features. Other than that, this model gives you flexibility, freedom, and a possibility to do what you do best, entrusting skilled professionals to handle software and mobile application development.