Who is the boss of a Quality manager

Dnyan Deshmukh

Staff member
Boss of the QC Manager
The strategic business direction of the company decides who is the boss of the QC Manager and it is mostly dependent on the expected outcomes of the business.

As the construction Industry is not well organized, the scenarios about who is the boss varies from organization to organization.

Defining the Quality becomes very difficult as we have lot of definitions for term 'Quality' which makes it relative and anyone with their perspective can relate it to anything and also it can be justified for many of the things due to no specific characteristic present in legal or obligatory documents such as Contracts Document, Nation Standard Codes etc.

Though in order to say a particular product does not lack in the inherent characteristic, we do find data in legal as well as obligatory requirement documents.

So it is up to the organization when it comes to defining the Quality and it is communicated by top management in terms of needs and expectations from a particular business. The needs and expectations keep on changing due to various parameters involved in the project and their impact on the overall business.

In simple words, if I am making faulty products and there is no impact on my business, I will keep on doing the same business.
but if my business is getting impacted either due to increased rework cost reducing profitability or declination in the sale impacting the overall business, I will study the causes for profit reduction or losses and take the corrective action to keep business running well.

These actions often come from the voice of internal as well as external customers, internal customers are well defined in the ISO 9001 guidelines. external customers are those who are the end users of the product which is delivered to them. Internal customers raise NCR, make Inspection reports, and give the statistics to top management to act on.
External Customer raises the voice in terms of customer complaints.

Those voices may fall on the prevailing deaf ears, blind eyes etc. until things are presented in a way showing the impact on the business or the business is facing serious losses.

So in my opinion the QC Manager is a boss of his own provided he knows what are the needs and expectations of Top Management and he has an action plan to meet those.
In the absence of knowledge about what he / she needs to do, the magic stick will be in the hands of others and they will use it for their own amusement when they don't know about the functions and use of having 'Tiger' in their Team.

So Finally i must understand, it does not matter who is the boss, what matters is what I must do.

Understanding may come from;
1. By Knowing the Needs and Expectations of the top management from that particular Project.
2. By observing and taking actions over the things which will impact the business (business impacts are often told in the financial figures).
3. After knowing the non-conformities, issues and expectations, derive the Quality Objective to track the performance of the Quality.
4. There are many people in Industry who have good years of experience but may lack real knowledge of the things. Instead of revealing it to them, the Quality Manager shall plan for the training programs and prepare the calendar of events. Through training, all construction teams can be trained on good practices to be followed and what things are wrong and how they are unacceptable. This way Quality managers can increase the team spirit and fill the skill gap without getting resistance in changing the management and improving the processes.
5. Reporting - Reporting can be verbal or written which shall always have the statistics.
6. There are many things that, if I keep on writing, may become a big book.

Now coming back to your Question

Who is the boss of Quality Manager
Boss can be anyone and it may not have an impact on your working in most of the cases where you can directly report above his position in cases where lack of support is observed or the actions by him are not in alignment with the strategic direction of the business.

What is the relation between the Quality Manager and Project Manager
Quality Manager is the internal customer of the Project Manager and Project Manager must satisfy the requirement of the internal customer (Depends on the strategic business direction, if the company is not focusing on delivering the Quality Product, Project Manager will not satisfy the the Internal Customer and eventually End user or product buyer will get dis-satisfaction for buying such product or service).

Most of the Organizations do not deliver faulty or defective products to end user but spend money on fixing defects in terms of rework (reworks may not be done with the long term durability aspect in mind but may be a kind of ad hoc solutions) which leads to cost overrun and pinch to the profitability from the business.
when it starts to eat up a good amount of profit margin, leading to losses or declination in the sales, Organizations do start focusing on improving the Quality of their Products.

So Quality Manager plays a very important role and he is like the eyes and ears of Top Management and his actions decide how the business is going to run.
If the Quality Manager is not aware about what he needs to do, he will lead the organization in achieving failures and losses instead of the success.

So my Questions to all Quality Professional's;
1. Have you understood the needs and expectations of the Top Management?
2. Have you set the Quality Objectives and tracking them to create success in business (PDCA Cycle).
3. Are you doing regular training programs for the complete execution team for improving the product quality based on analysis outcome from non-conformity reports, inspection reports etc.
4. Are you making efforts in improving the process by upgrading processes, Materials, Skills etc.
5. Are you doing brainstorming sessions with project teams for solving the issues?
6. Are you conducting regular meetings with the execution team?
7. Are you presenting a periodic review about how Quality is performing?
8. Are you recording the cost of poor quality / Reworks and doing analysis of the same?
9. Is your report which you sent periodically makes sense on overall business impact.
10. Are you upgrading yourself by doing a bench marking (benchmarking means visiting the projects of competitors and understanding what best practices they are doing which you can implement in your project for achieving better success).

I can even ask more questions but by reading above 10, you will find everything revolves around 1 question and to solve everything you have a PDCA cycle.

Understand the needs and expectations of the business direction from the project and make every possible effort to meet the same.

I hope this answer satisfies the answer you were looking for as well as it inspires you to become a better Quality Manager.
 
What are you explanation due that matters, absolutely yes. However, first of all, remember, in terms of work that there are limitations to work in terms of duties and responsibilities of each personnel, moreover in companies only valid work contracts are limited for a certain time, how do we improvise in terms of advancing the company in the long term? .Forming great or perfect quality takes a long time, not instant. So it needs long-term Design Quality, it's different when quality is embedded in the construction industry, if in the construction industry it's clear that quality merely fulfilling a quality plan is considered successful, only That's it, so the boss is who is listed in the organization, but everyone involved in the project is the first to be involved/responsible in terms of quality, not a project manager, but the whole team, including top management concerns .because quality does not start from the lowest level in the organization, but the company's mission and vision are described by its top management. Moreover, the top management has a future vision of making a world-class company, be it any industry, the construction industry, manufacturing and other industries.
 
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Like a project, that project is something unique, where there must be a Project Owner, then later in carrying out or working on the project there must be a Contractor, before there was a contractor there must have been a Design Consultant, when the project was running there must have been a Supervisory Management Consultant. Each of these has its own task. What is certain is that the boss in Quality of Work is each worker, however, the Report hierarchy is sure to end with the owner of the money financing the project, in this case the principal. In fact, this is Boss Quality.
 
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