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.
Welcome to this special edition of How To: Quality published at the Chartered Quality Institute’s website as part of World Quality Week 2024 campaign.
In this post, I will share couple of points to help you aid businesses to move from compliance to performance and go further to drive productivity.
How to: Quality
The Concept of Top Management:
I frequently have this conversation with other Quality Professionals when we talk about business issues. The language used in many cases is a language that is inherited from ISO standards.
‘Top Management must ensure that this division is ………’; or Top Management should really drive the support in fixing ……….’
My issue with this type of language is that it might infer that Top Management is ‘them’ / ‘the others’ and Quality Professionals have their hands tied. I personally find it difficult to accept this type of argument in many cases. A culture of commiting to what is right, and improving the outcome of processes in an organisation requires leadership. If you go through all the definitions of leadership and management, you will see a distinct focus:
Managers help organise work, where as leadership inspire and put a vision that others can believe in. So my question is always: do leaders have to be top management? or can leaders be anyone in the organisation?
I will always aruge and support that leaders can be anyone in the business. I understand that some decisions can be difficult or restrictive if you are not sitting on the table when other business leaders and process owners make company-wide decisions, but that is not a hurdle that cannot be overcome with the right skillset. So what is the difference between Compliance and Quality and how can we drive performance beyond only the compliance ‘tick’.
Compliance vs Improvement
That definition below represents the importance of adhering to regulations and your own commitment to them. Business Leaders understand that policies and procedures are not always written to represent the most efficient approach. And even if they were, context changes in organisations and such policies and procedures would require improvement to reflect the current status.
‘Compliance is how to ensure policies, procedures, laws and regulations are adhered to and monitored’
PwC Report: Elevating the compliance function to drive value to your business (https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/services/assurance/documents/elevating-compliance-function.pdf)
The fact that policies and procedures require revision to reflect the current status could indicate that complying with your policies and procedures is not necessarily enough to drive improvement.
Improvement however enforces the defintion of quality and helps businesses take it to a different level.
The PDSA Cycle (Plan-Do-Study-Act) is a systematic process for gaining valuable learning and knowledge for the continual improvement of a product, process, or service.
Deming, https://deming.org/explore/pdsa/
The PDSA definition gives businesses a framwork to operate by that goes beyond compliance. When you plan your work, the compliance aspect of regulatory / legal / customer becomes one part of the entire process. When you incorporate the how, why, and who in each process, when you incorporate a methodology to capture knowledge and learning, you are moving far beyond the status quo of compliance.
But how do you get to that stage? While there is no simple recipe, the starting point to do so is not difficult at all. If you are to do one thing only, do this 👇
Engage with the teams you are working with and ask them this question:
Is this the best way to do this step / process? Or do you think it can be done differently?
You will be surprised but the response you will get. Of course, do not ask this question on a whim or by a coffee machine. You need to create the environment that encourages your customer to pause and think about their response. If you are already working within a team for a period of time, you should be able to access previous reports, internal audits, external audit reports to give you an idea of whether the business is close to high performance or just at the start of that journey.
World Quality Week is an annual celebration hosted by the Chartered Quality Institute. The resources this year are brilliant. You can access them to support your initiative this year here: https://www.quality.org/article/world-quality-week-2024-resources
Happy World Quality Week!
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