Ensuring Quality in a War Zone

Forget root cause analysis, in Afghanistan, quality is about focusing on the basics.

Don’t miss the author’s follow-up to this article, “Going Low Profile in Afghanistan.”
--Editor

Profitable manufacturing requires efficiency, and this principle guides most (if not all) of our quality management systems (QMS). We’ve learned there’s little gain in correcting a production error if we don’t also find and uproot the error’s original cause. We’re so accustomed to this universal truth that we’re no longer even conscious of it. Sometimes, extraordinary circumstances can shock us out of this mindset and remind us that a quality system’s ultimate goal isn’t a more efficient organization. It is a quality end product.

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Comments

Construction Quality Assurance

Scott has highlighted a good point from my point of view, in an extremely interesting manner. I am interested to know if there are any other experiences in designing quality management systems out there in the construction industry. I believe that in certain circumstance root cause analysis would pay dividends particularly in future projects if a bank of experiences is compiled and used in planning for the future.

Deja Vu

The minute I found out about this article, I printed it out. Unfortunately, it took me a week to get to it. What I discovered was that Scott's experiences in Afghanistan closely mirrored my own. As one of two engineers on the Texas (National Guard) Agribusiness Development Team (TX ADT-01, May 08-March 09), I brought my experience as a Quality Manager and Industrial Eningeer. I was responsible for much of the same types of things while working with local contractors and engineers to build the projects that our team developed. These projects included check dams, solar and wind power, demonstration farms, and various buildings (such as a slaughter facility). Being the first ADT in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, we had to invent our processes and procedures as we went along. We also had contractors that wanted to charge ahead and some projects were begun without an understanding of the requirements, either by ourselves or the contractors. The expected quality of those early projects was difficult to define , so we had a hard time holding our contractors accountable. But we learned as we went along, and the subsequent projects became better defined, and managing the quality became easier. I had the same dislike for linking quality to payment, but it was very neccesary.
Another thing that was difficult was the releatively short amount of time that we were in Afghanistan. We had just started to mature in our processes and really get some good projects started, when it was time to come home. TX ADT-02 took over for us in March, and are currently running with the projects that we developed and are developing their own. I will be sending this article to my counter-parts, as I believe that Scott has some good advice.
Thank you so much for this article. I can relate to Scott's comments about winning hearts and minds. I agree that we should attempt to do this in the manufacturing realm also. I pray that Scott comes home safely.

Sincerely,

Tony George
Quality Manager
Southern Champion Tray
Mansfield, TX

Learning curves

"I pray that Scott comes home safely."

You and me both, brother! Thanks for the comments. We do tend to lose the lessons learned out here, don't we? I'm now on my second assignment here, still in Kandahar, but with a different company. The change in corporate culture has been startling. As you can see from the pictures, my former team had a low-profile approach, in which we blended in with the community and moved about invisibly. (More about that in the second article, appearing next week.) Most companies use hard security; armored vehicles, armed bodyguards, etc. That's the approach I have to use in this new job. This necessarily creates some distance between me and the locals, distance which prevents certain important lessons from being learned.

But the biggest problem, as you mention, is the turnover. Most people only do a year or so out here, and at the beginning a lot of people have to start from scratch. This is slowing down the entire effort. Even if people's individual contracts are only a year or so long, we need the aid programs they are working under to be more long-term, so we can get some consistency. (Also, Afghanistan's economy is 80% agriculture, and a good agricultural program needs five years to really take hold. Know any five-year programs out here? Me neither.)

Considerations of Quality/ manufacturing/ customer service aside, your counterparts in Afghanistan might also appreciate the following: http://alamanach.com/2009/06/03/counterinsurgency-for-aid-and-developme…