Quality leadership: designing the quality organisation as the company grows.

How should a quality function be organised?

The answer changes as a company grows, and getting it wrong at each stage causes predictable problems.

Why is quality not a department?

The quality function designs, coordinates and checks the system. The people who make the product, buy the materials and serve the customers own the quality of their own work. A quality function that does all the quality work itself becomes a bottleneck, and the rest of the company learns that quality is somebody else's job.

What works in the small company?

Perhaps up to fifty people, there is usually one quality person, often part-time, often combined with another role such as health and safety or technical support. The risks are overload and dependence. The priorities are to spread process ownership to line managers, to document what only the quality person knows, and to buy outside help for things that need independence, such as auditing the quality person's own processes.

What changes in the growing company?

Perhaps fifty to two hundred people, a small quality team forms: typically a quality manager, a quality engineer or two, and inspection staff. The risk is that the team becomes the place where problems go to be solved, while production and engineering step back. The priorities are clear roles. Quality engineers support process owners with problem solving and validation rather than doing it for them. Inspection is placed where risk is highest and reduced where processes are capable. And the quality manager spends time with leadership, not just with the team.

What does the larger company need?

With several sites or business units, the function needs two layers: a central team that owns the common system, the standards, the data and the audits, and site or business unit quality leads who run the local system and report on it. The risk is a central team disconnected from operations, writing procedures that sites quietly ignore. The priority is a common core with local procedures, and site leaders who are part of operations, not observers of it.

What about reporting lines?

At every stage, the head of quality needs direct access to top management, and the authority to stop product when necessary. In many companies the quality lead reports to the operations director. That can work, but it creates a conflict when output and quality pull in different directions. Whatever the line, make sure the head of quality has a seat at the leadership table and a recorded route to escalate.

What should you measure?

Measure the quality function by the health of the system, not by the number of findings it raises: age of corrective actions, cost of poor quality, customer performance, and how much quality work is done by process owners rather than by the quality team.

If you are redesigning a quality function for growth, that is organisational and systems design work we do. The consulting page explains how. Related: writing a quality strategy on two pages.