5. Improvement
An objective for any organisation should be to continuously improve. This involves having goals set for improving the improvement of products, processes and systems throughout your organisation. In addition, and ensuring all your employees are aware of these. These improvements could be Incremental or breakthrough.
In order to identify areas of improvement, periodic assessments against set criteria of excellence can be used. There then needs to be an established set of measures and goals that can track and guide any improvements. It is also important to be able to recognise improvements.
Aligned with continuous improvement is the idea that prevention based activities should be put in place. This may require all members of your organisation be provided with adequate education and training around areas such as:
- Problem solving
- Process re-engineering
- Process Innovation
- The Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle
Some of you are probably thinking that focusing on compliance is surely a good thing, right? Aren’t we supposed to be ticking boxes? Attending to checklists? Making compliance a priority?
In a word – no.
Most of the efforts around compliance are non-value-adding for the customer. Yes, non-value-adding. And all of this "busy" non-value-adding work stops the very things that do create value – namely, improvement initiatives - in their tracks. And that’s a big problem.
Quality management should be all about the customer, always. How do you satisfy your customers, and continue to satisfy them? By formatting spreadsheets? By making sure your certificates are hanging on your wall? By tidying up your filing cabinet? Of course not. Only continuously improving what you do to keep your customers - and thus shareholders - happy.
Improvement is what really matters. Improvement is fun. It’s stimulating. It’s satisfying for you and your customers. Compliance is none of these things.
Quality Managers need to commoditise their compliance efforts and focus more of their efforts on improvement. Commoditising means to design the compliance tasks in such a way that anyone can do them. Make it so that compliance doesn’t rely on you because you’ve got much more important fish to fry.
By spending less time on compliance and more time on improving processes and systems, you’ll see improved productivity and increased profits.
Quality Managers need to look for problems and then try to solve those problems. You need to get yourself into a prevention mind-set. As quality thought-leader Phil Crosby once said: “Why spend all this time finding, fixing, and fighting when you could have prevented the problem in the first place?”
The other Quality management Principles are:
- Customer Focus
- Leadership
- Engagement of people
- Process Approach
- Evidence based decision making
- Relationship Management
