Chapter 2: What Is a Quality Perspective Towards Developing Performance Indicators?

This chapter describes what exactly is our perspective of quality and why this perspective is useful in developing performance indicators in public administration (PA) as opposed to other approaches. It then provides an overview of the concepts and activities associated with Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and its House of Quality (HoQ) tool. Thereafter, the chapter broadly introduces our derived performance indicator HoQ (PIHoQ) framework and articulates how that differs to a standard HoQ tool used in other contexts.

As stated in our previous chapter, many readers will have no doubt encountered quality management initiatives or projects in one form or another at some point in their professional lives. Quality management has been victim to numerous re-branding and re-packaging exercises over the years, with varied levels of success. Consequently, suspicions may well be raised whenever an approach, technique, or framework is presented to solve a problem or address a specific gap. Despite this, the general principles of quality management have remained the same and are indeed universal in their applicability. Customer focus, employee engagement, teamwork, and continuous improvement and learning must be fundamental elements of any quality initiative if it is to actually achieve a positive and sustained move forward for an organisation. It is these core elements that became the genesis of discussions between the authors when faced with the problem of developing performance indicators within PA and, therefore, provide the foundations of our quality perspective. The importance of the customer, and, more specifically, their requirements, and expectations of a product or service must be at the forefront of any discussion regarding quality and what it constitutes in this context.