7.16.2003
From the book "MY 500 DAYS AT APPLE" by Gil Amelio page 130
Chapter 9: Nerd’s Labors Lost and Found - SOLID GUIDELINES FOR NEW PRODUCTS
Why were we doing such a rotten job in product quality? I may not have followed up on how flowers were brought into my office, but I sure wanted to know what had caused the sorry state in the quality level of apple products. We had approximately 650 people throughout the company working on quality leader, and it felt like we couldn’t ship a single product that wasn’t plagued by either design or quality difficulties.
Companies normally expect to spend about 1 or 2 percent on quality. Not even counting warranty costs, we were spending on aver-age 5 or 6 percent.
The reason, I eventually discovered, was another long-time flaw in company behavior. Some Apple engineers, instead of finishing a product and turning it over to the quality people to get their blessings on it, were operating with the attitude, “why put in all that effort? We’ll just get it pretty far along, and then let the Quality guys find the problems. “So they were in the habit of turning their projects over to Quality prematurely. Quality would find flaws and send the product back. The engineers would do some more work, and send it over to Quality again. And it would continue bouncing back and forth until it appeared to be ready. Meanwhile the product launch date had probably been missed, and the release version likely had some lingering problems that slipped by undetected in the under-the-gun pressure to get the product to market.
Quality is supposed to be designed in by the engineers to begin with, not painfully arrived by the expedient of fixing whatever problems you manage to discover. And the proper task of the quality organization is to confirm the fact that the engineers have successfully created a trouble-free product. The Quality troops had become a kind of secondary engineering organization, and had bloomed in size because of it. At budget time, everyone would complain that the quality organization was getting to much money. As bizarre as this sounds, the biggest complainers would be the engineering people, sounding off that there were to many folks assigned to quality.
I would soon lean on the engineers, trying to implant anew perspective on all quality issues. “you should be embarrassed when the quality organization rejects a product you’ve submitted. Tour goal should be use them so that they help you build a bullet-proof product. When it’s completed, all they should need to do is put their stamp of approval on it. “Eventually there would be signs of headway, but this better system took hold only very gradually.
Chapter 9: Nerd’s Labors Lost and Found - SOLID GUIDELINES FOR NEW PRODUCTS
Why were we doing such a rotten job in product quality? I may not have followed up on how flowers were brought into my office, but I sure wanted to know what had caused the sorry state in the quality level of apple products. We had approximately 650 people throughout the company working on quality leader, and it felt like we couldn’t ship a single product that wasn’t plagued by either design or quality difficulties.
Companies normally expect to spend about 1 or 2 percent on quality. Not even counting warranty costs, we were spending on aver-age 5 or 6 percent.
The reason, I eventually discovered, was another long-time flaw in company behavior. Some Apple engineers, instead of finishing a product and turning it over to the quality people to get their blessings on it, were operating with the attitude, “why put in all that effort? We’ll just get it pretty far along, and then let the Quality guys find the problems. “So they were in the habit of turning their projects over to Quality prematurely. Quality would find flaws and send the product back. The engineers would do some more work, and send it over to Quality again. And it would continue bouncing back and forth until it appeared to be ready. Meanwhile the product launch date had probably been missed, and the release version likely had some lingering problems that slipped by undetected in the under-the-gun pressure to get the product to market.
Quality is supposed to be designed in by the engineers to begin with, not painfully arrived by the expedient of fixing whatever problems you manage to discover. And the proper task of the quality organization is to confirm the fact that the engineers have successfully created a trouble-free product. The Quality troops had become a kind of secondary engineering organization, and had bloomed in size because of it. At budget time, everyone would complain that the quality organization was getting to much money. As bizarre as this sounds, the biggest complainers would be the engineering people, sounding off that there were to many folks assigned to quality.
I would soon lean on the engineers, trying to implant anew perspective on all quality issues. “you should be embarrassed when the quality organization rejects a product you’ve submitted. Tour goal should be use them so that they help you build a bullet-proof product. When it’s completed, all they should need to do is put their stamp of approval on it. “Eventually there would be signs of headway, but this better system took hold only very gradually.
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