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Shelter Chieza Change Management
Of late my mind has been pre-occupied by issues that have to do with quality. Probably it’s a result of all that has been going on around me. Would it surprise you that one of my New Year resolutions has been a total overhaul of everything that I have been associated with?I am the kind of person that starts working on a New year in December of the previous year. So I changed everything in December last year in preparation for the New Year.

While some people are busy celebrating the end of a year, I had already started mine.

I joined a new bank, developed new interests, new hobbies, and new places for shopping and hanging out.

It has been therapeutic to discover that the same way of doing things tend to slowdown a persons’ progress.

I realised one thing though, the deliberate choices I had made assisted in activating my 6th sense of quality.

Trust me, there are people that are serious about maintaining quality in this nation just in case there are some critics that always tend to see the bad side of everything in Zimbabwe.

I like John Ruskins way of looking at things, he said quality is never an accident, it is always a result of intelligent effort.

Everything that you want to maintain as quality is never accidental- from quality service at your workplace, quality learning centre, quality education, quality dressing, quality marriage right up to quality relationships.

There is no way that you can achieve quality without hard work. Quality is now expected by consumers and is ceasing to be a differentiation strategy.

You might have come across the following words “ . . . we have maintained a reputation of supplying innovative high quality material . . . ” in company profiles as a corporate objective but the question is, is quality subjective?

Does quality vary with circumstances surrounding the economics that you find yourself as a business?

Can business maintain the same perception and attitude towards quality that we had more than 15 years ago in a vibrant Zimbabwean economy?

Do we as a nation have a standard/yardstick that we can measure for quality?

Is Standards Association of Zimbabwe succeeding in spreading the message and are companies acting as embodiments of the certification they receive.

All those ISO certifications, if we were to effectively adhere to them, would we have the same recurring problems of defects?

I have changed my view on quality over a long period of time. I view quality now in its relation to value entitlement.

I define quality as a state in which value entitlement is realised for the customer and provider in every aspect of the business relationship.

Value can be quantified- it can be seen in terms of economic worth, practical utility and availability for both the customer and the company.

If I make a decision to buy a lawn mower from a local hardware, I may see its display on the shelves as attractive.

What attracts me to buy it may be a reference I was given by my neighbor or the brand or my need to mow my garden.

I cannot conclude that I have acquired a “quality” gadget when it’s still on the shelves. As I am paying for it by the till, my mind is registering potential to be “quality”.

I therefore cannot evaluate it as a quality product at this stage. It is only when I start using it that I can value it as quality.

In this era of counterfeits, durability will influence my evaluations of quality.

Value entitlement means as a customer, my expectations are being met by buying a high-quality product at the lowest possible cost.

For the provider it is a rightful level of expectation to produce quality products at the highest possible profits.

Quality is a deliberate process of coordinated built-in efficient systems .

By quality, we are not only looking at the end product but efficiency of the product as well.

There are various campaigns going around that are designed amongst other things to resuscitate the production and encourage consumption of local (Buy Zimbabwe) compared to foreign alternatives.

At our church, we have termed it “Buy NLCC”. I totally agree with this drive, however, buying “local must not be an excuse for mediocrity, substandard offerings or clever protectionism.”

Quality in mobile devices, and in smart-tech computing and communications spheres, often triggers strong commentary from the supply side to the consumer experience.

Look at what happened to Microsoft and Nokia.

Does quality spur or impede innovation in 2015 and beyond?

Design and device makers must deliver the quality promise of product to consumers in challenging situations.

Reporting and promoting success is a critical part of the culture of quality. One wonders why we seem to go back to vendors/suppliers that fail us.

Options must be available for the customer to choose from, the monopolist position is very retrogressive in a developing economy.

Why must I wait for one supplier to connect electricity at my house, it’s not like I have not paid for connection, I only need a connection that will take a technician five minutes at most.

For some organisations, it is futile to “sell” quality to an organisation that doesn’t understand the intrinsic value of quality.

I have concluded that leanness is generally a good thing in business; too much cost-cutting turns out to be a bad strategy, not only for workers and customers but also for businesses themselves.

Till next week, May God Richly bless you!!

◆ Shelter Chieza is a Management Consultant. She can be contacted at [email protected]