So, I’ve recently invested in a new laptop for work. I got it on Tuesday. Today I noticed that the “J” key on the keyboard had come loose. That’s after less than a week of average use in my home office. The laptop hasn’t been out on the road (yet) and as it is performing well I haven’t had to bash the keyboard in frustration at a 20 minute hang for no reason (like on my old laptop).
It is probably an easy fix, but it does raise a question about the build quality on Dell laptops when one of the “home” keys for touch typing can come loose so easily.
But it is just one key. Surely not a big thing? I suppose that is a valid view. But often quality and perception of quality hangs on how the small stuff works.
- The hotel might be great, but there’s no coffee with the in-room tea and coffee facilities (I like to make a cup of very strong coffee first thing in the morning when travelling for work)
- The flight might be fine, but the hot sandwich you wanted to order from the attendants wasn’t in stock
- A broken keyboard stops you typing “jumping jeosophat”
A while ago I wrote an article for the IAIDQ about the “long tail of risk”, or the long tail of quality. My basic premise in the article was that as you tackle the big issues of quality and risk in Information, the smaller issues become increasingly important, so there is increasing value to be found in the “long tail” of issues.
That’s why “Zero Defects”, while in part a wonderful slogan, is in fact a valuable goal to set for Quality Management. Setting your sights lower means you are accepting inevitable mediocrity. Why do I say this? Well, simply because the common argument against zero defects is that it is unattainable as a goal (it’s not) and compromises need to be made (they often do). However, if you set your target at 99.9% defect free, you’ll still find compromises being made (“we’ll aim for 60% this quarter and increase again next quarter”) and fudges being introduced.
I saw a great presentation a few weeks ago from a Clinical Quality lead from the UK NHS. He gave some great statistics as to what 99.999% quality means:
- 6200 ATM errors per week in the UK
- 18 fatal airline crashes per year, in the UK
- 2 children given to the wrong parents every day, in the UK
So. My faulty key might be one component out of 108 on the keyboard and many thousands in the laptop. But it being broken has soured my experience and reduced my perception of quality of the laptop as a whole. While it isn’t up there with a fatal airline crash, it does bug me.
(As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Qantas are considering suing Rolls Royce for a minor defect in the engines of the A380 Airbus which lead to oil leakage and an engine fire. It’s only a small thing, but…)
R.Todd Stephens is a very interesting man. I’ve met him and have sat through an incredibly interesting tutorial he gave back in 2006 in London on Enterprise Metadata. What interested me most about his presentation was how he was referring to tools and technologies that I was tinkering with to try and improve communication of key concepts and improve efficiencies in information management in my day job. Indeed, some of the tools were things I was playing with outside of work as a hobbyist blogger. It’s a pity I haven’t had a chance to implement too much of the vision that he triggered in my mind at that time for improvements in the day job … but who knows what might happen by the end of the year.
This is a really cool book. The basic premise is that you can make money in the margins through the wonderous world of the Interweb thing which has removed traditional economic barriers to sales success (location, inventory storage etc etc). Apart from the thinking involved, which is explained very clearly, one of the biggest boons to me was the links and pointers to useful on-line services that I can use to support a professional Association I’m involved with (the 
Where the Long Tail examines the infinite applicability of Pareto efficiency (read the book and that will make sense) Freakonmics examines the way in which we often assign root cause to things with out a sound evidentiary base. From why crime rates didn’t explode in the US in the 1990s to why drug dealers live at home, this book is a thought provoking romp through the fallacies of “conventional wisdom”. I like it because it shows the value of speaking with data – having actual statistics to back up your arguments as well as the impacts of jumping to conclusions about the real causes of any effect.
All of life is an accumulation of little things and eventually one little thing causes a situation to change dramatically. Be it the sudden popularity of a brand of shoe or the jump from a minor outbreak to a disease epidemic, everything comes down to a single tipping point. Read in conjunction with Freakonomics and The Long Tail, this book gives rounds out the macro implications of micro things – be they the small unit sales of niche books on Amazon (which add up to big money volumes simply because Amazon never runs out of room) or the impacts of seemingly unrelated issues on a chain of events (such as Roe vs Wade and the crime wave that never happened in Freakonomics).
This book is an excellent initial primer in the work of W. Edwards Deming. It covers off a biographical note on Deming, his 7 Diseases of Management, his 14 Points of Transformation and the infamous Red Beads experiment. It also contains case studies of a number of companies that applied the Deming methods. 
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The ideal companion to “Out of the Crisis” is Deming’s last book