Cliff Hobbs at myITforum.com

[Rant] Are Quality Certificates REALLY worth it?

I’m just curious on a couple of things here:

• How many of you work for a company that has some sort of ISO or BS Quality certificate, standard whatever you want to call it in place?
• How many of you as customers would rather work with a supplier that has such a certificate in place rather than one that doesn’t?

Now don’t get me wrong I’m all for doing as top a quality job as I can (one of the downsides of being a perfectionist), but what I can’t stand is being forced to follow processes, procedures, standards whatever you want to call them that are just there for the sake of saying “I’ve followed this process so the end result must be a quality job.”

I remember many moons ago being sent on a course to become a Quality Auditor. After listening to the instructor drone on for a few hours about the benefits of such “quality” certifications and the only way to get one was to “do what you say and be able to prove it” I questioned him on the value of such standards by asking:

“If my product is rubbish and I can prove it’s rubbish then I’ll get my quality standard?” to which he reluctantly replied “Yes” which goes to prove my point.

Now this raises more questions:

• How much more companies with a quality certificate charge their customers Vs a company that doesn’t just because they harp on about “We have quality certificate abc so you can be assured of a quality product.”?
• How much of this premium is to cover the cost of the extra bureaucracy generated by such systems?
• If you took the end product from a company with a quality certificate and compared it to one without such a certificate would there really be that much difference between them?

A quality job is NOT based on simply following a set list of processes and procedures (especially those that the staff have no buy into if all it does is makes their lives a lot more complicated and let’s face it boring).

No. A quality job is taking whatever you’re producing and producing it in such a way that actively engages all of those involved in the process to produce as best a product as possible (learning from your mistakes and being able to feed these back into the next release thus improving quality each time).

If you’re making a “quality” product at a minimum it should be “fit for purpose” but in my eyes it should exceed this.