Catching it before the customer does

Quality is not an inspection at the end. By the time you are checking finished work, the cost of the fault has already been incurred: the materials, the time, the rework, and sometimes the customer.

The cost multiplies at each stage. A fault found at the design stage costs almost nothing. The same fault found in production costs the production. Found by the customer, it costs the product, the delivery both ways, the refund, the relationship and the review that stays visible for years.

That arithmetic is the whole argument for moving quality earlier.

Two kinds of cost. Prevention and checking, which you choose to spend. And failure, which you do not: rework, scrap, refunds, complaints, lost customers, reputation. Organisations that skimp on the first pay much more of the second, and the second is harder to see because it is spread across many places and nobody adds it up.

Add it up once. The hours spent redoing work, the returns, the discounts given to apologise, the customers who did not return. Most organisations are shocked by the total and it is the number that justifies everything else in this course.

Quality is defined by the customer, not by your standards. Something built precisely to a specification the customer did not want is not quality work.

And it is mostly a system property rather than an effort property. People trying harder produces a small improvement; changing the process that allowed the error produces a large one.