Quality management

Inspection at the end sorts good from bad. It never makes anything good. Quality is decided by the process that produced the work, so that is where the effort belongs.

Define quality as the customer experiences it

A standard nobody outside the team recognises is a preference. State quality in terms a customer would agree with: correct, on time, complete, usable — with a threshold, so conformance is a fact rather than an opinion.

Then distinguish:

• Specification quality — does it match what was specified?
• Fitness for purpose — does the specification serve the actual need?

A process can hit specification perfectly while producing something nobody wants. Only the second question protects against that.