THE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF QUALITY ASSURANCE (QA) AS AN INTEGRAL ASPECT OF FAMILIES, WORKPLACES AND HUMANITY IN GENERAL

Written by Dr Violet Makuku - The Director: Global Quality Assurance Association 16 January 2023
This article is meant to educate and bring awareness on the importance of quality assurance (QA) in all facets of our lives. This is because over the years of my experience as a quality assurance specialist and through interacting with different people as well as through experience, I realized that a lot of people (implementers and recipients) have a narrow understanding of quality and quality assurance. The negative perceptions about quality assurance and misconceptions about what it is and what it is not also come as a result of the way quality assurance is practiced in the workplaces by, in some cases, people who are not qualified in this specialist area. Sadly, the random checks I always do reveal that some people think of QA as nothing other than policing, which simply blocks the vision about all the many good reasons why QA should be embraced both in the homes and all workplaces, globally. This greatly affects the implementation and positive perception that should come with it.
Fortunately, all the above are some of the major reasons why the Global Quality Assurance Association (GQAA) was established. It is therefore, very important for organizations, institutions and government entities to understand, adopt and undertake QA processes. The overall reason for embracing QA is to make sure that products and/or services are and remain of high standard through identifying and addressing challenges as soon as they are detected. In addition, ensuring and assuring quality should be everybody’s business through being part, directly or indirectly, of the assessment, monitoring, evaluation and improvement of the various inputs, processes and outputs of the different workplaces we find ourselves in.
In October 2020 Mrs Emmaline Soken-Huberty, a writer from Portland, Oregon  just picked 10 reasons, among many, on why QA is important. I completely concur with Soken-Huberty (2020)’s views. They are among the many reasons why it is also important to invest in anything and everything to do with QA, from capacity building and training workshops, to the different activities and engagements, as well as membership, among others. One of the most important things about QA is that it saves time as a resource that cannot be created by anybody. Therefore, it may be taxing to set up a quality management system (QMS) which enables early detection of anomalies but it takes even more time to fix errors if they’re allowed to occur and get out of control. Software development is a good example where an analysis showed that fixing an error in the production stage took up to 150 times longer than repairing it earlier in the requirements design stage (Soken-Huberty, 2020).
Click here to read more on 10 reasons why Quality Assurance is important.

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