Quality is coming home

Who do I want to win the International Quality Awards 2018 “Innovation through Quality Method” category? Well this one for me is easy. England football manager Gareth Southgate and his team.

It seems that quality in sport has reached new heights – first with Sir David Brailsford (British cycling coach and general manager of Team Sky) and Team Sky, and it has now penetrated into the August depths of the FA with it being reported during the match with Colombia that Gareth and his team had analysed the World Cup and found or ‘Defined’ that it is decided by a high proportion of penalty shootouts and then ‘Measured’ England’s poor penalty shootout record and discovered that successful goal scorers take more time in their preparation (think of Jonny Wilkinson in rugby as an example). They then used this ‘Analysis’ to train our team to become good at penalties by being slower and taking more time to focus.

The ‘Implementation’ was on the most public stage possible, and it is noticeable that the only England player not to score his penalty (Jordan Henderson) obviously forgot this advice to prepare more thoroughly in the heat of the moment with the inevitable save.

By the time you read this of course, all will be over, and time will tell whether the England football team have, by applying quality principles, finally fixed an area of weakness so long ignored by previous managers. For now, we can only wait with bated breath to see if the final stage of the DMAIC formula ‘Control’ has been undertaken. 

Neil Mellor, CQP FCQI, is Managing Consultant at Work Insight Limited and is the Secretary of the Construction Special Interest Group