Thursday, June 17, 2004
Quality is in the details.
On Sunday, I spent most of the day being handy around my friend Terri’s house, building shelves, putting up hooks for her accessories, hanging pictures, and replacing batteries in smoke alarms.
About 90 minutes of the day was spent in putting together a rather awkwardly large shoe-rack that was pre-cut, and simply had to be assembled. This was when I had my epiphany on quality. So the rack had four flats that needed to be screwed together to form its peripheral shell. I kept figuring that I must be placing them wrong, because the pieces were ever so slightly out of alignment at each joint, the cumulative effect of which was to make it look a bit like a rhombus. It stood, but tiredly. Thinner sheets with intercuts needed to be joined together and then inserted as a grid into the shell to form the shelves of the rack, and even they seemed just a little bit out of place. And the backboard didn’t exactly cover the back edges evenly, though, in all fairness, there was enough overlap to nail them in place.
In the end, when I was done, it looked like a shoe rack, but not a GREAT shoe rack, ya know what I mean? I just wasn’t proud and satisfied. (These assemble-yourself gizmos are great ego-boosters for non-manual guys like me 
So I call the 800 number on the instruction sheet which promises 24/7 help, and I get connected to a recording that says that normal business hours are Monday - Friday, 8-5 EST. I call them back this morning, and when I explained my situation, a rep calmly asked, “So what’s the problem exactly? All the parts are there, right? And everything fits?”
This is an interesting analogy to what agencies do for clients. And why its sometimes hard for us to see that the work we do, while complete and “checked off” in every way, doesn’t really delight a client.
See, quality is in the details. Not just in the overall effect.
Our objective, at every stage in our engagements, should be to make sure that the details don’t get overlooked. Consistency should be rife in our documents, in our deliverables, in our letters, in our conversation, in our delivery, and even in seemingly innocuous places like our email signatures. Because quality is not just an attribute of what gets done, it’s also a major component of a client’s perception of us and our agency.
Think about this for a moment: what does someone mean when they say, “We deliver work of the highest quality”? To me, it’s a nonsense statement. How can the promise of that statement be measured? We decide what delivers a program in our requirements and planning process, but do we spend any time determining what makes it *quality*? We know it is possible to deliver a set of programs that do their job, have it meet spec, and yet, know in our hearts that it wasn’t our best work; there’s that subjective gap in what we *could* have delivered, and what we *did* deliver. The “internal nag”, if you will. Do we make a note of that nag, learn and grow from it? Is it possible that the client feels the same nag, but is unable to articulate it? Is it possible that the program is successful, and yet, not of the *quality* it could have been, because of those nags in our own interpretation and self-assessment?
So this is my thought for the week: Answering those questions for ourselves in the work that we do every day can help a little bit in getting us to understanding what will truly differentiate us as an organization that delivers, and delivers with quality.