Product Norms and Professional Standards
The guiding distinction quality focus often ‘hides’ itself in the product or the service, in the function or in the professional standard. Therefore it is no longer obvious that an implicit decision is being submitted here and that this has great consequences for the form of the organisation, the area or the department. You can also see this in the buildings, the office furnishings, the clothing of the employees, the type of communication, the atmosphere, in everything: the decision about thoroughness or speed oozes from every pore! Thus the product chooses the employee too: a ‘hectic person’ as watchmaker, a ‘pedantic person’ as online editor?
To act against the logic of the profession or the product in the guiding process quality focus is almost impossible in organisations. The politician (quick) promises ‘prompt assistance’ after a flood, and the council offices (thorough) cannot make good on this promise with their own, bureaucratic procedures. Everything must be checked! Thus the most difficult situations can arise: a medicine must be tested lengthily and ‘thoroughly’, before it gets permission to be sold. Everybody can understand this! Really, everybody? Even those whose life would be lengthened by the medicine and, therefore, need it ‘quickly’, because otherwise they will die?
During change projects you always have to consider what influence the profession, the function and the product have on the understanding of quality and, therefore, also on the other guiding processes.