Quality is Happiness

Quality is not just “degree of excellence” or “conformance to requirements”. Quality is Happiness.

Happiness of people who work on product development. Happiness of clients who receive the product and are delighted to use it.

Only happy internal customers (peers, sub-ordinates, project team members, testing department) ultimately lead to happy customers.

If people don’t find the product they are developing to be useful, they would not be happy working on it. No one likes to produce anything that is useless.

When people believe in the vision/purpose of the product they are developing, they will happily “walk-that-extra-mile” to deliver Quality.

Happy people are more likely to produce better Quality. Great Quality delivered to clients makes them happy.

Unfortunately, most quality models focus heavily on “process” and less on “happiness”.

To comply with a rigid process is Management. To have happy, motivated people using process as a tool to ultimately deliver Quality is Leadership.