Quality Is as Quality Does

Quality Is as Quality Does!

My name is Mike Hrycyk and this is my quality blog.  I wanted a space to start talking about the evolution that quality is taking in my life.  Mostly in my business life, but who knows, it could thread through my entire life.  I’m reasonably sure that if I start injecting a high level of importance of my own opinion of quality into my personal life that I’m going to start having some pretty large issues with my family and friends. (There’s a topic for a future entry right there, ‘what is quality – objective or subjective,’)

I looked around for a blog title, theme, vision, mission statement, etc for a while that would properly encapsulate the way that this evolution has been progressing within my own personal sphere and in the end it kept coming back to, ‘quality is as quality does.’  It didn’t really fit the cutting edge coolness quotient that I’m sure everyone goes for when naming their blog and my wife seems to think it’s a little bit quaint (which is I believe her way of saying it sounds like an old person’s blog).  However, what it kept coming back to was that it really is on point for me. 

I wanted a title that highlighted a few things that the blog is going to tackle as time goes on.

1.        Quality – really I want the concept of quality to be at the core of everything that I’m going to talk about.   Well right there, the word quality is in the title twice, I have that requirement met in spades.
2.        Process – in the past few years I've discovered that I’m a bit of a process junkie. I don’t like process for process sake even a little bit but I like digging into processes to find out how they work or don’t work.  What can be improved?  What would work better if it was just written down?  Simple processes followed regularly can solve almost every quality issue but without understanding the processes contributing to the issues you can’t find those solutions.  I think that the title as a whole contributes to this feature.
3.        Management – I’m really a student of the environment that I live in and one thing I've found as I’ve moved around through management at different companies is that it really isn't something that people learn in a standard manner.  Managers are grown in so many ways and the quality of the way they interact with their jobs, their people and their companies suffer for this fact.  I think the least reliability to be found in job skills out there is in management skills.  I’ll be exploring this a bit as we go as well.

So that explains the title.  It doesn’t necessarily explain the url.  QAisdoes.

I, being myself, is probably the truest explanation for explaining but I’ll try to make it clearer anyway.  Most of my career has involved QA in some way or another and that’s where I identify the strongest.  And to me QA is does, pronounced ‘q. a. is does’ quickly, sounds cool to me.  And really, what can trump that. 

Well, it was also available when I went looking for that ID out there on the web.   I was able to get the url and the twitter name of qaisdoes without any issues.  Now the fact that my wife, when she reads the word, auto-tranlsates it in her brain to ‘QA-isodes’ as in a blog about QA episodes, didn’t help so very much, but still…it sounded cool.

So, in the next entry I’m going to explain a bit more of where I come from and where I’m going but for today, I’m signing off.