Sandhya Venu Sanjay

Quality Circles: A group of team members who do the same or similar kind of work get together and identify few issues/ concerns and deliberate together on the probable improvements and development.
 
This can be adopted across organization, people on job are the one’s knows the techniques to manage and improve the quality and this will build in a philosophy. The one who is on job is the most trained person to bring improvements provided they take sometime out to sit back and understand the day to day issues, identify the concern areas, analyze and find resolution to the problems through simple, innovative and unique ideas.
 
Yes, it is very much relevant even today in the organization: One such framework that was implemented in IT infrastructure services is provided below.
 
We created a governance mechanism to ensure that the ideas are logged, tracked till their completion. We clubbed it with the organization roles to enable the small group employees to work together to identify the related problems and they are arriving at the improvement and where required we have the seniors/supervisors and required support team assistance for the completion.
 
In this framework we came across of self-motivated who were limited number met frequently with their own interest to identify areas of improvement at a periodic interval arrived at action items and reported the status of the same with their supervisor. The status update was presented with and probable solutions which were arrived with detailed analysis such as severity of the problem, urgency of the problem, and frequency of the occurrence.
 
Supervisor  would evaluate each of these solutions vs problem and take it up to the management to get the necessary  approvals on investments, change management and  consensus for implementing the solutions.
 
I remember those days with my colleagues when we implemented this and it was a huge hit because everyone could relate to it as it went well with the organization structure. And it also got the traction as there was rewards and recognition associated with it along with the strong governance model.
 
Since quality circle is more a voluntary activity it can die if it does not get the management support. 
 

 
An Agile organization is very similar to the quality circles in my view. There can be improvements identified with in Chapter, Tribes and squad.
 
Quality circles and agile sprints both work towards coming up with best solution. There is a cross functional team approach for quality circles, and we see the same with mix of roles coming together in sprints to achieve a common objective and bring in improvements sprints after sprints
 

 
In agile organizations we do see self- motivated individuals and self organized teams who are empowered to come together by their supervisors to solve business problems. There is so much of similarity in the way quality circles relates with Agile.
 
In both the approaches we see the focus is on customer and organization objectives.
 
The concept of quality circle is not time bound, it will be applicable across times, we may use different names to make it relevant as per need.
It can be called in various names and adopted in different forms but the spirit of it remains the same.