The true role of _____ in your shop

I was travelling internationally last week; planes and airports were packed with overseas travelers. During boarding, I watched with curiosity as I saw a very capable flight attendant struggle with a bag. Attendants are there for safety and service; I’ve had the opportunity to watch international attendants in training and they spend a lot of time focused on service to the customer. If you can, imagine that your customer is restricted to an increasingly smaller space over time with less and less value provided, and that’s a tall ask.

This attendant was “fighting with” a smaller, older gentleman’s bag. He had brought on board two roller bags and several miscellaneous items. (An aside here: I’ve never understood why they don’t forbid people who don’t follow the one piece of luggage and one personal carry on from boarding.) She was trying to pull and push several pieces in and out of overhead storage to accommodate his rather oversized carry-on. They were heavy, bulky and she was not a particularly tall person.

It’s happened to many of us, if not all. You’re hired to do one job. You find yourself picking up all kinds of tasks and, before you know it, you’re running an entirely different set of daily tasks, monthly goals, and quarterly rocks than you were hired (on paper) to do. Things change. Businesses must be responsive to stay competitive and so, naturally, you must be responsive.

This is true of all businesses. Whether you’re in the finance sector or manufacturing, you must stay current on your own work while you manage the work that’s been given to you by your executive team. And you may find that the work they’re asking you to do is not in line with what you were trained for. You’ll do it to the best of your ability but may not meet the goal if you don’t know exactly how to get there.

Let’s use an example of a Quality Assurance team member. They are my absolute favorite example because they cost your company far more lost value when this happens than most other positions.

Production Operations

In operations, QA is trained to be preventative in nature. Team members are educated on how to spot issues before they happen and put in place the required measures to avoid them.   Quality Control (QC) is typically a subset of this. While assurance puts in place the measures to reduce the amount of QC required, QA is focused on “providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled” (definition by ASQ). QA sets the stage and QC measures whether it happened correctly.

If you’ve been trained in preventative measures, this is about exploration, research, and analysis. It’s a steady process with key milestones and measurements. In our world of manufacturing, this is about ensuring that every step of the routing has the right procedures, instructions, and safety protocols to ensure that it’s done right the first time. QA team members may review the results of current and prior orders to determine how often their procedures fail to bring 100% compliance (or as close as they can get to that nirvana of both cost and time savings).

If you move that person into firefighting mode (I’ve seen it far too many times), putting them in charge of fixing issues out on the shop floor, you’ve moved the needle and provided the team with someone who may not be best-equipped to do that role. Someone trained in thoughtful exercises with analysis and testing is now asked to “roll with the punches” and “handle it” (whatever it is).

Production Control

The issue for you in this scenario is two-fold. You have taken a valued resource that is hired to help you save time and money by avoiding costly overruns and problems and put them into rapid problem-solving mode. The team on the floor is most concerned with getting work complete; the measure for them is usually the number of orders, jobs or items that make it to the stocking shelves or dock doors. They do want to do good work, but they’re measured on volume. Your QA member helps them get that done and you win, right?

Not necessarily.

You’re losing focus on the way to prevent issues in the first place. You are spending money plugging holes and eliminating the person who can make sure holes aren’t created in the first place. You are spending the money twice, essentially – once on the rework measures in production and twice by eliminating QA time. And that’s going to be expensive for you down the road.

You’re also asking a methodical person to step into a quick decision-making role. They may be able to do it, but it’s not going to be comfortable for them and you may end up losing one of your most valuable (and difficult to find) roles.

Digitization gives this role and your entire team quick access to information and problem-solving. If it’s the right solution. It should provide decision pathways for your team and immediate access to approved workarounds to ensure that your team can be as flexible and planned as possible. Have you explored the use of tools to help the QA team to stay in their lane? It just might pay for itself.

Coming back to the title bar, we've used Quality Assurance as just one example.  Talk to any member of your team and you likely have this problem across all roles.   So the amount you're spending is exponentially increasing.  If you need help with that, let us know.  We can help.