Beyond The Standard

Not so long ago careers seemed so straightforward. We found a job, went to work, undertook some training, did our job as well as we could and then we went home.  In those misty eyed nostalgic days we did not have to worry about corporate targets, annual assessments, metric-driven incentives and complex operational methodologies etc. Instead life, and work, was so much simpler – or so it seemed!

And then, somewhere along the line two guys called Kaplan and Norton’s invented an organizational performance management tool called a ‘Balanced Scorecard’ and nothing has ever been the same since.

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There are few managers in organisations that do not recognise the importance of maintaining and improving quality. One of the perceived barriers to implementing quality processes though is the cost. When it comes to making decisions most managers will speak in terms of money so the ‘cost of quality’ is always an important factor and consideration in the larger scheme of things.

The term “cost of quality” undoubtedly has different meanings to different people. Some equate “cost of quality” with the costs of poor quality due to finding and correcting defective work. Others equate the term with the expense incurred to attain good quality. Others use the term to mean the costs of running the quality department. 

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Education is not always the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about Quality and Business Certification but in the wider context attitudes to quality can start manifesting from a relatively young age.

Today’s primary school students are tomorrow’s business leaders and we sometimes forget how crucially important the quality of teaching is during our early years. Having a ‘quality’ approach to education in our schools is actually an important foundation on which we should be building the right attitudes and behaviours in our young people.

According to the CBI, deep-rooted educational problems need to be addressed in order to break things like the cycle of social deprivation, low skill levels and long-term unemployment. One of the best ways to achieve this is to improve the quality of teaching and focus more resources on primary schools to prevent children from poor socio-economic backgrounds falling behind.  Studies have shown that primary schools should be the prime target for improved quality of teaching because it is during this time that the gap between high and low attainment widens.

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One of the most important elements that defines a successful business is the quality of its corporate strategy. Get the strategy wrong and the business can fail very quickly but get it right and a business can flourish and become profitable very quickly.

So when we think about quality in the corporate environment we need to be thinking in ‘top-down’ mode. In other words getting the high level strategy right first as everything else falls naturally out of the strategy. But what do we mean exactly by ‘strategy’?

Strategic management is all about making decisions regarding the future direction of an organisation and then putting them into action. There are two main aspects – ‘Strategic Planning’ and ‘Strategic Implementation’.

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It seems that every commercial enterprise these days is a ‘brand’. But brands have developed far beyond being about things like our favourite baked beans or cornflakes – now they’re also about the supermarket that sells them. Take Tesco, Waitrose or Lidl for example; each has its own distinct identity. Today’s brands are about ideologies and values: the charity we support, the political party we vote for, even our football heroes. Some of the most successful early brand names like ‘Hoover,’ ‘Sellotape’, ‘Stanley knife’ and ‘Walkman’ even became synonymous with the product itself.

Today every brand has its logo, its recognisable badge or ‘mark’.  Design agencies come up with just the right image which will then be applied to every platform carrying the brand. PR companies have to work hard to get their clients’ brands noticed in a crowded marketplace and the competition is fierce!

The Centre for Strategy and Communication in London describes brands thus: Read the rest of this entry »

Since the dawn of the IT industry in the early fifties fixing software systems failures has taken up almost as much time as developing software in the first place. Well meaning programmers have created their beloved code with the same passion as artists or sculptors creating their own ‘masterpieces’ and enjoy showing off their creations with as much pride. The problem though is that with great art and great sculpture beauty really is in the eye of the beholder whereas with computer code the final outcome is more objective – it either works or it doesn’t!

As programmes became more and more complex, particularly through the eighties and nineties, the importance of writing good quality code became ever more important – not least because of the incremental costs of code re-working. Various bodies started to look at how to increase quality in the IT industry, not just to improve code but also in terms of IT projects overall and the Software Engineering Institute was at the forefront of this movement.

In the early 1990’s the Institute developed a model which although initially designed for software development soon expanded to take in many other disciplines. The model was called the ‘Software Capability Maturity Model’ (SW-CMM) and has come to be recognised as a powerful and practical quality tool that can be adopted by any organisation. Read the rest of this entry »

Instilling a ‘quality culture’ in any organisation will always be a challenge. In today’s recession-battered, lean, mean organisations the drive for profitability – at a time when margins are squeezed and competitive pressures are high – tends to sometimes marginalise the need for consistent quality.

So how do overstretched executives ensure the workforce remain committed to creating and maintaining quality? Some might think it’s down to regular ‘quality circle’ meetings or a barrage of ‘quality newsletter updates’ but I think there is more to it than that. These initiatives undoubtedly have their place, but let’s be honest; it’s not always easy to ‘teach’ quality. Sometimes it has to come from ‘within’ – which begs the question ‘should recruiters be tasked with the challenge of recruiting quality at the outset?’

This is not as crazy as it might seem. Maybe the real answer to creating a quality focused workforce is not so much about training and changing mindsets as recruiting quality orientated individuals right from the start. Maybe HR departments, interviewers and recruiters should only be appointing new staff who demonstrate aptitudes and behaviours that demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of ‘quality’. Read the rest of this entry »

When you work in the ‘standards’ business it is sometimes easy to forget that for many people getting to grips with the nitty gritty detail of new standards and the implications of new legislation is no easy matter.

The reality is, of course, that meeting the demands of new and changing regulations is a hugely complex issue for service providers. In addition to the cost and resource issues faced, new Acts of Parliament or new Trading Regulations can directly affect how businesses target and interact with their customers. Similarly, there is sometimes a lack of guidance available explaining how businesses should tackle these new obligations and it is evident that many people simply don’t really understand what they should be doing.

In the financial sector for example, “treating customers fairly” is now supposed to be standard policy and is central to responsible and ethical practice – but where service providers often fall down is when dealing with individuals who are vulnerable or disadvantaged. These types of customer are very likely to need additional assistance or help but, like any consumer, will not want to be patronised, labelled or targeted with specific products and services. Read the rest of this entry »

Certification is a strange thing. The connotations of the word seem to be different depending on who you are speaking to. For some it simply means another word for ‘audit’ with all the ‘baggage’ that the word audit implies. For others it means attaining a certificate that formally acknowledges that your business undertakes its work in a quality oriented way and for a few it means recognition and credibility in the marketplace.

To a degree all of these have some validity but in my opinion none of these views manages to capture the complete picture because they are lacking what I would call the ‘people element’.

For me, as Managing Director of Certification International, it is very important that I don’t overlook this ‘people element’ but instead communicate the ethos and focus of our business effectively and accurately so that there is no misunderstanding. And actually, the word ‘communicate’ is at the heart of what we do. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most popular books of the last fifty years is the rather oddly named “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig. It’s a novel that works on two levels. Firstly it’s a brilliant story of a road trip across America (something our md John Pymer recently undertook) and secondly it’s probably the best book about the nature of ‘quality’ ever written.

Quality is a strange thing, as the book testifies. As soon as you try to capture its true essence it slips from your fingers like an ephemeral thing and yet today ‘quality’ is big business and it’s the buzzword on the lips of Directors and Chief Executives the world over.

According to the Oxford Dictionary the definition of ‘quality’ is:

“The standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something” Read the rest of this entry »