“TRUST BUT VERIFY”
~Russian proverb, popularized by Ronald Reagan
Most field repair companies choose to hire the best leadership and craft. Having top talent in the field on complex projects is paramount to ensuring they provide the highest quality products and services to the client.
Through their experience and training, complicated technical work can be executed by technicians according to plan again and again and to a high level of quality. All that said, Quality Control (QC) is a critical function needed to safeguard the company’s reputation, prevent foreseeable issues, and overall increase client trust.
QC Managers and Technicians have a critical role and are often the unsung heroes in the field. Their primary goal is to ensure that all the I’s are dotted and the T’s crossed, which will lead to total project fulfillment. QC personnel are there to guard against inadvertent and intended scope and process changes as well as “human nature” issues, which do play a part when working long hours for weeks on end in the field (or in a more controlled shop environment…).
While Quality Assurance (QA) is a proactive activity, QC is reactive – always after the fact to ensure things were done according to that step in the overall plan. QA helps to minimize the issues that QC might uncover, but the best QA in the world cannot override the need for a solid QC function.
Let’s face it – QC folks often get an undeserved bad rap because they are viewed as “always looking for what I did wrong”. And, at the end of the day, that’s exactly what they’re doing. And it’s in every parties’ best interest for them to find all the issues so that others can make a decision on whether what was done is acceptable or requires revisiting.
A special thanks to all QC folks for helping to keep us all between the lines so we can say without a doubt that we did what we said we were going to do.
