Anybody who knows me knows I am a Star Wars geek. I spend way more time than I care to acknowledge obsessing about the Star Wars films, collecting random star wars toys, and musing about the"what ifs" in the Star Wars universe. The other day, it occurred to me,"What if The Empire had implemented a Quality Management System on the Death Star?" So I thought a bit on this, and here is what I think could have aided The Empire in their attempt to rule the galaxy if they had put Quality Management as a strategic initiative.
Project Management: From the time that the passing star plan were conceived, it required The Empire almost 20 years to complete the Death celebrity. A project this big requires multiple functions entailed, and delegation of activities. The Death Star project management team consisted of three important people - Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, and Emperor Palpatine. These aren't the more flexible supervisors, and aren't above taking employee mistakes or missed deadlines with the aid of a lightsaber, force lightning or a death beam.
Maybe if The Empire implemented a Quality-Based Project Management System, they'd be able to clearly specify the functions involved in the project, assign jobs into those roles, and handle the job from an aggregate amount. Workflow retains the project deliverables on track, and perhaps this level of visibility would enable them to maintain control, without having to resort to the Dark Side as their sole way of clairvoyance.
Document Management: Let's be honest - even The Empire could've used a strong document management program. Given the sheer size of this Death Star, with all the thousands of"employees" that worked there, there could have been tens of thousands of documents that would have to be commanded - Work Instructions, Job Descriptions, Procedures, Floor Plans, and so on. You'd think that with this"technological terror" The Empire assembled, there could be secure Document Management System in place.
How did a little droid like R2-D2 plug into the network and was able to download the Death Star programs like it was a space walk from the park? My guess is that The Empire, in all its glory, was using a file system to store documents. If The Empire could have used a Document Control system such as people in a Quality Management System, access to those specifically sensitive documents would have been limited to those who had the proper access rights. Furthermore, document control may restrict the details of certain fields within the data, so that no sensitive data is obtained.
Worker Training System: Without appropriate employee training, then many business run the possibility of Quality episodes, Safety events, and other dangers to the business enterprise. It seems to me that The Empire was not monitoring training at a centralized system. If they had been, then they would have been able to see that nearly 80% of the Stormtroopers in The Empire could not reach a target with a blaster if their lives depended upon it (and it frequently did). Or perhaps they'd have discovered the truth that their patrol processes clearly miss security breaches - Like 80 year old Jedis skulking round the tractor beam. Proper training system enable managers to see visibility into not only who's trained, but also how well they are trained and if activities have to be taken to update training records for inferior performance.
Supplier Management and Supplier Rating: Let's face it The Empire had to have contracted out to build this Death Star. All the components that go into building a completed product rely on suppliers and contractors to help complete the process. When viewing the film, we know that the Rebels discovered a weakness in the design of the Death Star (thanks to the weak file management system). If The Empire could have had a real-time review and evaluation system, they'd have been in a position to scrutinize that access interface, and send a Corrective Action to the knuckleheads who thought placing a direct access to the Death Star center was a good idea.
Nonconformance, Audits and Corrective and Preventive Action: Let's stay on this, afterward. Obviously, we know that the Death Star had a flaw. It was only in the final hour The Empire realize the threat, and by that stage it was too late. If they had a quality system in place, they would have found that defect, whether through routine space Audits (or at the very least an Audit through tremors in the Force), or a Nonconformance as soon as the defect was set up, also issued a Corrective Action to fix the problem. Clearly, Quality took a backseat to their overconfidence, and finally resulting in, well... you know the rest.
Management Review and Reporting: As I said before, the primary project managers used anxiety as their principal motivator, and seldom relied on the data to assist them with Quality. In the film, you see the officers of this Death Star sitting at a conference room, and not one of them generated a report - If they had a solid reporting system which collects quality information from all areas of the Death Star, and rolls up this data to help ascertain the top dangers and top quality problems, then maybe that meeting would have gone otherwise. Maybe if this bad man had revealed Darth Vader his newest Quality Report, he wouldn't have gotten the old"force choke" in the Dark Lord of The Sith. Possessing a top-level reporting system that presents the Quality System challenges in a single view may have mitigated their risks.
Risk Assessment: I think that perhaps The Empire took several risks when going about this whole Death Star thing. Did Tarkin assess the chance of analyzing the Death Star on Leia's home world? Did Darth Vader assess the risk of allowing the Rebels escape together with the Death Star plans? Did they evaluate the risk when they underestimated the rebel's likelihood of destroying the Death Star? In any system, it is very important to incorporate risk into the processes, whether Quality or similar system. If The Empire could have perhaps weighed against the severity and likelihood of the risks related to their actions, maybe we would have seen another outcome of the narrative. Risk Assessment, especially at a Quality Management system, enables managers to filter out crucial event, and make better choices about how to handle themand then supreme the mitigate the probability of recurrence.
Obviously, we all know that when The Empire followed these principles of Quality Management, we would not have had the story which makes Star Wars so great. Nonetheless, it's sometimes fun to envision,"What if?" And see life could have been if instead of Darth Vader, we had Darth Deming.
WHITE PAPER: An Insider's Guide to Selecting a Quality Management Software System
As demand for Quality Management solutions grow, so does the seller landscape - more software vendors are providing alternatives for Quality and Compliance Management than ever before. Having a high demand and a large seller landscape, it sometimes becomes hard to discern which systems provide the best value and guarantee a more successful implementation.