Welcome to the series of How To:Quality. Your 3 min guide on how Quality Professionals address various business needs to drive Improvement and Governance.

Quality Professionals, regardless of the sector they work in, strive to help businesses achieve their strategic objectives. They do this in various ways: be it deploying governance frameworks, implementing improvement strategies, or delivering assurance programmes.

This month, I bring you steps you can adopt when you want to ensure your Quality Strategy sticks operationally. Read on if you are a Quality Professional, or a business leader who needs to maximise the success of their strategic initiatives.

How to: Quality

Before we tap into the how to make your strategy stick, I wanted to share with you the context of a Quality Strategy. In this blog, you can apply the following tips to any size strategy; whether you are introducing a new policy, a new procedure, or an entire change management framework to help your organisation deliver better outcomes.

As with any initiative, putting a policy or procedure in place is one thing and making it operationally stick is another. If you want the work that you are working with the business to stick, read the following three simple steps to maximise your chances of embedding the change into your business as usual.

Before you embark on the how to steps, it is essential that we get this core principle embedded first:

You need to start preparing yourself by putting yourself in the shoes of your operations. If you are an employee in the operations division who will be impacted by this Quality Strategy you are introducing, what’s in it for them? This principle helps you stay focused on your customers’ needs (internal customers in this scenario). Understanding and outlining the benefit of what you are about to do, gives you head start when engaging with the team. So what are the three steps I am suggesting:

1. Engage with the end users
2. Host road shows
3. Schedule calibration sessions

1. Engage with the end users

As simple as the title says: engage with the end users: front line staff, operational staff, the doers of the process. Do not engage with them while introducing your strategy. Start way before your strategy is even formed. Engage with them so you understand the pain points they have. Having this level of understanding not only helps shape up your strategy, it also helps you focus on the areas you will get quick wins, and therefore gain trust.

2. Host road shows

When your new policy, procedure, or Quality Strategy is developed, sharing it in one form of communication is not enough.

There are three types of communication as defined by Project Management Institute, PMBOK Guide 7th edition: push, pull and interactive communication.

• Push Communication is what you force onto your audience: think of the emails you send
• Pull Communication is what is available for your audience to extract whenever they are ready: think of your Sharepoint sites in the business, or confluence pages
• Interactive communication is the combination of both. This is the type which I am referring to in your road shows.

Of course make sure your policy and procedure is available for people to access in the right channels, and of course make sure you issue the notification to tell your stakeholders that your strategy, policy or procedure is ready. But please do not stop there. Hosting road shows, workshops, seminars to introduce what has been put in place is a great way to get engagement from everyone. This is your chance to be at forefront of this initiative, to tell your customers that you have listened to them and this is what you have delivered, and to communicate to them how their needs align with the business strategy as whole.

3. Schedule calibration sessions

Finally, calibrate.

💡Calibration Sessions are not only aimed at the manufacturing sector. While the term is derived from calibrating machinery, you can use the concept for all processes, even those that do not involve machinery and are based on human input only.

Calibration sessions are designed to gather input and broaden your understanding of how people are interacting with your strategy. You calibrate to ensure that you get to a point where all stakeholders are aligned with the ‘how’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘which tool’, etc.

You will find that almost always the assumption that everyone is already calibrated is false. People interact with policies and procedures differently. They all bring nuances that you may not have thought of. Hosting calibration sessions helps you iron out these nuances and provide guidance on a unified approach. You need your inter-rater reliability score of all stakeholders to be very high. Then when the calibration sessions have achieved their objective.

Finally, as you make changes to your strategy, assess the significance of this change, and decide if a road show is required. And repeat the cycle. Your efforts to have your Quality Strategy stick are never linear.

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If you would like to see a particular topic covered in this series, please get in touch and let me know the topic or scenario, and I will do my best to help. You can get in touch on your preferred platform 👇

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