Production & Quality working Together!

Recognize Disagreements Mediate Quickly Collaborative Culture

Educate everyone on everything Establish common Goals Share Responsibility

By Steve Schumacher
 Recognize that disagreement is inevitable
If you have your processes, systems and
policies in good working order, the times
that major disagreements between quality
and production will be few. You will never
be able to eliminate those differences
completely, but you can work to minimize
the frequency and depth of them. Given
that, do your best to ensure that everything
in your organization points toward high
quality and high quantity, on schedule.

By Steve Schumacher
 Mediate disagreements quickly
As soon as you become aware that
something has happened that put
production and quality at odds, you need to
address it. The longer you wait, the more
you risk that both sides dig in and have a
more difficult time meeting a middle
ground. Meet with representatives of each
department separately, collect the data,
and hear them out. When you have all the
facts, and have let the parties vent a bit, it
is time to bring them together. The more
you can involve them in the decision about
the way forward, the more ownership they
will have in the decision
By Steve Schumacher
 Set a collaborative culture
The goal should be to create a culture
where departments collaborate and
cooperate horizontally across departments.
Look for opportunities for all departments
to spend time with each other personally as
well as professionally. Doing that will help
build relationships where people
understand each other. When people
understand each other, they will work to
overcome challenges to those relationships.
Stephen Covey said – “Seek first to
understand, then to be understood.”

By Steve Schumacher
 Educate everyone on everything
In most organizations, we spend a lot of
time and money to train our employees on
their individual jobs and responsibilities.
That training is targeted at productivity,
efficiency, effectiveness, and quality. It is
very vertically focused. In order to minimize
conflicts in the workplace, set up formal
training for all employees on all aspects of
the business – production, quality,
maintenance, finance, human resources, IT,
etc. That training should not be in depth. It
should be enough training to give everyone
an understanding and appreciation of the
environment, expectations, and challenges
all departments face.
By Steve Schumacher
 Establish common goals
Clearly, you must work with your
employees to establish individual and
department goals for whatever time frame
is meaningful for you. To help departments
minimize differences and work toward
bigger picture goals, establish and reward
departments like operations and quality
control for meeting common goals, along
with their individual ones. You must weight
those metrics significantly so people know
that you want them to achieve, not just
their goals, but the cooperative goals also.

By Steve Schumacher
 Share responsibility
Train your quality and operations folks to
solve their own issues. The best of all
worlds is that when conflict arises,
employees and managers recognize it, deal
with it, and carry on. That is a sign of a
mature organization.

Conflict and disagreements between

operations and quality will happen. What
differentiates organizations is how they
deal with those differences when they
happen.

By Steve Schumacher