4 JURAN ON QUALITY BY DESIGN in the quality disciplines, they are amateurs in the best sense of that word. Many companies have tried to deal with this problem by making quality specialists (quality engineers, reliability engineers) available to the planners as consultants. It hasn't worked very well. What has worked much better has been to train the planners themselves in use of the quality disciplines—to train the amateurs to become professionals at quality planning. A major decision to be made by upper managers relates to this matter of "quality planning by amateurs." The principal options are (a) Provide the amateurs with consulting service, or (b) Train the amateurs to become professionals. In the experience of the authors, companies which have adopted option (b) have outperformed those who have followed option (a). The decision faced by upper managers is whether to mandate training the amateurs to become professionals. The Mission of This Book