Quality Management Standard – An Interlinked System
“Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.”- Pat Riley
The International Standard for Quality Management has been with us since 2015. In fact, if you include the previous Standard (which in many ways had a similar range of requirements), then the Standard has been with us for some 14 years. If you have managed to maintain your registration for all this time, you should be incredibly pleased with your achievement. You will probably find the annual visit of the Certification Body ‘just like a walk in the park.’ Is that sufficient? Are you looking for more benefits from your investment of time and effort? How useful would it be to involve an experienced and confidential outsider in your Continual Improvement process to get more bang for your buck? The partnership can be very rewarding and that is why we do what we do.
Quality Management Standard Requirements
The 2015 International Management Standard of management systems (QMS) contains 7 major requirements (clauses), together with various sub-clauses. Finding the evidence to show you meet all these requirements will gain you the certificated recognition for your system. The first question then is does your system meet the 7 requirements individually? Like islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity? Or have you integrated the way you manage the business into a seamless series of processes that make up the requirements of the Quality Management Standard as an interlinked system?
A different mindset may be required to determine the interrelationship between each of the requirements. It should promote a series of questions and the answers should expose things that may have been hidden if you apply the requirements individually. In the same manner that your processes should be interlinked, then the application of the requirements of the Standard within the different processes should be able to demonstrate a “Golden Thread” running through all of them.
Applying the Standard
Exposing these hidden elements is like rocks becoming visible when the tide goes out. Managing these hidden elements will be similar to steering a ship around the rocks. An even better situation would be to eliminate the rocks completely. This means of applying the Standard, to provide a high-level view of how the requirements impact your business model, should enable improvement actions to be effective by removing the negative aspects of random speculative actions. A high-level view supported by good and reliable data will drive improvements in outputs.
A good and reliable implementation of the QMS will include the generation of data. This data, if managed in a sensible way, will give the basis for analysing your processes and support structures and thus produce continual improvement actions that output the performance of your business. The more clarity you can provide about how you are going to manage continual improvement actions, the better.
Very often it is best to see the final outcome as a picture. It is like a keen football fan having a clear picture of how their team will look at the end of the season.
- Where they will be in the league table,
- how many goals they would have scored, and
- who is most likely to have scored them.
The enthusiasm, euphoria and uplifted feelings of success may all be part of this picture.
The P + P Team
Whether you are satisfied with a walk in the park or want to continually improve business performance, you may want to contact us on:
Tel: 01284 330400
Email: info@performanceplus.co.uk
Web: www.performanceplus.co.uk
We work with small to medium-sized businesses across the East Anglia Region.