Quality Flashcards
Discuss the key principles and practices required to create a quality-oriented organisation. Pay attention in your answer to issues such as leadership, people management, strategy alignment and deployment, customer focus and organisational learning.
Leadership
Management should lead not supervise. Focus on the outcome should be abolished in favour of leadership. The role of the leader is to motivate and remove the barriers that prevent the people who work for him achieving pride in their work.
People
There is no shortage of good people in industry, but that in itself is not sufficient. The strength of a company is very much dependent on its knowledge base and, therefore, an industry needs good people who are improving with continued education. This may be regarded as the strategic capability of education as compared to the tactical use of training to meet a specific need at a particular point in time. Empowerment and coaching need to be a reality.
Remove Barriers that Deny People Pride of Workmanship.
There are many barriers which prevent the workforce from achieving pride in their work; poor quality of incoming materials, inadequate work instructions so that people do not understand the standard of work requires, ill-maintained machines from which is demanded maximum output regardless of quality achieved, supervisors who do not understand the work and who are unable to assist the workforce, defect reports and suggestion schemes which are ignored by management etc. If people are made to feel that they and their work are important they will want to come to work. If management understands the problems which beset the workforce and takes corrective action, the workforce will respond as they are enabled to achieve good work.
Strategy Alignment
Focus on where the business is going. Often concentration on the problems today precludes sufficient effort directed at the problems of the future. Is the Company dedicated to quick profits or constancy of purpose? The next dividend to the shareholders is not as important as working for the long-term prosperity of the Company. Use techniques such as Hoshin Kanri and ‘cathball’ to deploy strategies to lower levels in the organisation to ensure that everyone knows where they fit in and how they can contribute.
Customer Focus
Everyone involved in a product or service must understand the customers’ requirements and be trained so that he/she understands the standard of work required and how he may achieve that standard. The company must actively seek out the customer requirements. Most companies are organised in functional departments each of which may be busy optimising its processes without understanding the function or problems of the others. Each department is the customer of and supplier to other departments in the company. Many problems are contained within the confines of a single department so why not break down the barriers and start functioning as a team.
Organisational Learning
It is important that experiences and activities are reviewed regularly in order to learn from what has occurred and to ensure that mistakes are not repeated. Challenging norms and standard ways of doing things should be common place. Systems need to be set up to support this.
PDSA cycle used to test ideas.
Take Action to Accomplish the Transformation.
Management must take action to understand the preceding points and decide on the direction to take the company for the future. Management must have the courage to forego traditional styles of management and adopt the new philosophy.
Fear
Frequently the best interests of a Company are subordinated to the need to satisfy particular performance measures - especially production quotas. If people make mistakes they frequently hide them for fear of the consequences of disclosure. Fear of the effect on annual performance assessments can lead people to mediocre performance - if you don’t make a decision you cannot be wrong and held to blame for a poor decisions.
Link to EFQM model somehow.
