Happy New Year! We're continuing our series on the Future of GCP QA by looking into QA's past. Today we consider the career of Joseph Juran.
Juran was born in Romania in 1904 and emigrated to Minneapolis with his family in 1912. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with an engineering degree, he got a job at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, IL--yes, the same Hawthorne Works that employed Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming. The Hawthorne Effect, a phenomenon in which worker productivity improves in response to being observed, derives its name from research conducted at the factory.
Although Juran was not involved in the Hawthorne Effect research, his work similarly focused on the human elements of quality. His career paralleled Deming's, with a start in consulting that caught the eye of Japan's Union of Scientists and Engineers, leading to groundbreaking work with Japanese companies. Juran promoted quality as a management philosophy and stressed the importance of training upper and middle management. His Quality Handbook, first published in 1951, is now in its seventh edition.
I was able to access a free version of the fifth edition, published in 1998, from Academia.edu. Like many business books published in the latter half of the 20th century, Juran's philosophy of quality is general and descriptive in a way that sparks recognition but leaves the reader with little prescriptive advice for implementation. For example, his methodology for Quality Planning includes nothing less than project selection, customer identification, identification of customer needs, product planning, process planning, and product development. Quality Control and Quality Improvement, the other two pillars of his "quality trilogy," are similarly comprehensive. If everything is Quality, is anything Quality? Here we see the intersection between management consulting and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Juran is well-known for extending the concept of quality to settings other than manufacturing, and toward that end The Quality Handbook includes chapters on travel and hospitality, financial services, government services (authored by Al Gore), and health care services. The latter, for example, applies the concepts of process optimization, statistical process control, and product inspection to the health care setting. It describes two case studies of targeted efforts to improve quality in health care: an effort to reduce mortality after cardiovascular surgery, and an initiative to reduce delays in emergency room care.
Juran incorporated the work of two other influential scientists in his approach to quality. He popularized the Pareto principle - the idea that a small percentage of issues create a large percentage of problems (for example, 20% of known software bugs generate 80% of the reported incidents). He also based his ideas for inculcating a quality culture on Margaret Mead's Cultural Patterns and Technical Change.
Together, Juran and Deming influenced the development of Japan's Total Quality Management approach, which we'll look at next as we move on to the history of quality standards.
