A Zero Defects in the AI Era: Phillip Crosby’s Legacy for Modern Quality.
Speakers
Keynote: Niels Malotaux (Germany/Japan)
Keynote: Tom Gilb HonFBCS (Norway)
Professor Joseph Kasser (Australia)
Dr Larry Kennedy (USA)
Agenda
9:30am - Registration - Opening Address - Margaret Ross, Raid Al Qaisi
10:00am - Opening Keynote
5:00pm - Estimated end of SQM, start of Quality AGM
6:00pm - Estimated end of AGM
Synopsis
Quality remains essential in the AI era: prevent defects, verify outcomes, and design for excellence.
Conference Overview: Free for both BCS Members and non-members.
Join global experts at the 33rd BCS Annual Online International Conference on Software Quality Management (SQM), bringing together practitioners, researchers, and thought leaders to explore how enduring quality principles remain vital in an AI-enabled world.
This year’s conference honours Philip Crosby’s legacy and examines how prevention, conformance, and zero-defect thinking continue to shape modern quality practice. The programme will explore how quality professionals can maintain trust, assurance, and human accountability while working with intelligent systems, automation, and data-driven decision-making.
Sessions will also consider the relationship between quality, ethics, and practical delivery in contemporary organisations.
Conference Themes:
- Quality by design and prevention.
- Zero defects and right-first-time thinking.
- Verification, trust, and assurance.
- Human judgment in intelligent systems.
- Quality, data, and ethics.
- Practical lessons for today’s professionals.
Why Attend?
This conference is designed for professionals who want to understand how classic quality principles apply to current challenges in AI, digital transformation, and service delivery. It offers a forum for insight, discussion, and practical examples from experienced speakers across the quality community.
Audience:
- Quality professionals.
- Software and systems practitioners.
- Managers and leaders.
- Academics and researchers.
- Students and early-career professionals.
Format: The conference will be held online, with keynote talks, presentations, and discussion sessions designed to encourage practical learning and exchange across the community.
Keynote: Quality costs less. What are you going to do about it? - Niels Malotaux (Germany/Japan)
As a student I wanted to earn some money to travel to Japan, and I ended up to work at the Quality Department of ITT in the Netherlands, where they made telephone exchange equipment. That was while Phil Crosby was Quality Manager at ITT. In his book ‘Quality is Free’, he describes that he distributed a 16-page booklet to every unit, explaining the definition of quality, about prevention, and the Zero-Defect concept. I found it, and apparently this completely inoculated me with the Quality is Free concepts.
When I now re-read his books ‘Quality is Free’ and ‘Quality without Tears’, it is as if he describes what I have been doing ever since: Taking quality seriously, keeping Zero Defects as a target, and delivering results that people need, on time.
I must admit that he also wrote of that booklet: “The results were amazing. No one paid the slightest bit of attention.”
Just like when I even mention Zero Defects, people, especially in software, are looking at me as if I’m coming from Mars. Because everybody knows that software without bugs is impossible, right? Wrong!
I must admit that initially I also didn’t believe it, until I tried. Having experienced it myself, I keep trying to help people delivering Quality on Time, as I know that, once people try, they’ll find out that it costs less, and creates happy developers and happy customers.
In this presentation I’ll show some background and examples. Finally, I will challenge you: “What will you do differently from tomorrow?” Or will you go back to work as usual?
Keynote: Design to Qualities - Tom Gilb HonFBCS (Norway)
Qualities are not about reducing defects. That is one bad tactic for improving one quality. Qualities, the many quality types, are best achieved by designing them into the system.
About the speaker
Keynote: Niels Malotaux (Germany/Japan)
Niels Malotaux is an independent international Project Coach and expert in optimizing organizational, management, project, and team performance.He has some 45-year experience in designing electronic and software systems, at Philips Electronics, 20 years leading an electronic systems design company, and since 1998 helping projects to deliver Quality on Time: delivering the Right Results at the Right Time, enabling customer success.From time to time he still develops electronic products for clients, which allows him to understand the pitfalls of developers first hand.Since 2001 he taught and coached well over 400 projects and teams in 40+ organizations in the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Germany, Ireland, India, Israel, Japan, Poland, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, the UK and the US, which led to a wealth of experience in which approaches work better and which work less well in real practice.
Keynote: Tom Gilb HonFBCS (Norway)
Tom Gilb was born in California 1940, lived in the UK 1956-58, Norway 1958 to present. Joined IBM 1958.
Consulted for a very wide variety of organisations, and managed to influence some of them in interesting and well documented ways. See ‘PPPP’ below.
Tom is an Honorary Fellow of BCS. See Gilb.com for more details. Tom is the author of thirteen paper books, dozens of E-books, and hundreds of papers on a wide variety of subjects. His book ‘Competitive Engineering’ is a substantial definition of systems engineering ideas. His works are at Researchgate All free, and https://leanpub.com/u/tomgilb (free samples)
Many BCS and other videos by Tom are at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tom+gilb, and at the BCS SPA video site https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBhokJ0qd3_wlvr0j85YhmNfNj8ZJ8M-
Tom has guest lectured at universities all over UK, Europe, China, India, USA, Korea – and has been a keynote speaker at dozens of technical conferences internationally.
There are very many organisations and individuals who use some or all of Gilb methods. IBM and HP were two early corporate adopters. Over the recent 20 years, 20,000 engineers at Intel have adopted his ‘Planguage’ requirements and design methods. Some case studies of the use of his methods are in ‘Powerful Ploys for Problems, using Planguage’, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384054757_PPPP_Powerful_Ploys_for_Problems/, which includes an updated references section with free publications, up to 2024.
Tom is 85, retired, living in Norway. He follows up electronically daily, and his highest wish is to spread useful ideas to the next generation.
Professor Joseph Kasser (Australia)
(Biography to follow)
Dr Larry Kennedy (USA)
(Biography to follow)
Our events are for adults aged 16 years and over.
This meeting is conducted in accordance with the BCS Code of Conduct for Meetings.
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This event is brought to you by: Quality specialist group
Supported by: Business Change specialist group, Dorset branch and Hampshire branch
