Quality Management Strategy

Quality Management Strategy
By The Office of Government Commerce – OGC, UK

Purpose

• Quality Management recognise a number of management principles that can be used by senior management as a framework to guide their organisations towards improved performance. The principles cover: customer focus, leadership, involvement of people, process approach, system approach to management, continual improvement, factual approach to decision making, and mutually beneficial supplier relationships.
• Quality Management provides suitable guidance to build upon Quality Assurance standards to achieve business benefits for all stakeholder groups and focuses on continual performance improvement to sustain customer satisfaction. The core concepts are:
• continuous process improvement – driven by senior management, focused on critical process areas with explicit improvement goals
• customer focus – recognising both internal and external ‘customers’ and their needs and providing value to the user of the product
• defect prevention and non-compliance – seeking to prevent non-conformance issues arising with products and services early in the development cycle and being proactively engaged in prevention
• universal responsibility – recognising that quality is not only the responsibility of quality assurance teams or reviewers, but should be totally pervasive in all aspects of the business, with everyone seeking ways to improve the quality of their own products and services.

Fitness for purpose checklist

• Are senior management directing the organisation to achieve both customer and regulatory requirements in a manner that satisfies all stakeholders?
• Does the organisation recognise the capabilities and resources required to achieve the organisation’s objectives?
• Do procedures ensure that the organisation does not enter into commitments it is unable to meet?
• Have business processes been designed to achieve the organisations goals?
• Does the organisation continually evaluate its business processes?
• Are deviations from product or service requirements promptly detected and rectified?
• Does the organisation have an effective problem management process to assure that problems are resolved promptly and prevented from recurring?
• Are there adequate performance measures and are they used as a basis for management decision-taking?
• Are customer needs and expectations continually assessed to ensure high customer satisfaction?

Notes

The application of quality management principles and the implementation of quality management systems are likely to vary from organisation to organisation. However, Quality Management share a common intent that:

• organisations design and manage their processes effectively to achieve corporate objectives and avoid functional silos that compete for resources
• organisations choose the appropriate activities and measures based on an objective analysis of their operational and business environment
• management create an environment in which people are motivated and initiative and creativity are not stifled.

It is essential that sufficient time and suitable resources are dedicated to testing and commissioning to assure the fundamental success of the project. There are advantages in using dedicated, specialist resources i.e. independent of the development / construction team and the project sponsor should ensure that testing requirements are considered throughout the project lifecycle and a suitable test strategy and appropriate test plans are formulated and instantiated.

Suggested content

Quality Assurance standards specify the requirements that a quality system should meet, but do not dictate how they should be achieved. The key requirements are that an organisation should:

• determine the needs and expectations of customers and other interested parties
• establish policies, objectives and a work environment necessary to motivate the organisation to satisfy these needs
• design, resource and manage a system of interconnected processes necessary to implement the policy and attain the objectives
• measure and analyse the adequacy, efficiency and effectiveness of each process in fulfilling its purpose and objectives
• pursue the continual improvement of the system from an objective evaluation of its performance

Source information

• Corporate Quality Management System
• Industry standards
• Programme Plan

The Office of Government Commerce – © Crown Copyright 2009