There's ten key success factors that influence the effectiveness of your
Quality Assurance Management System so in this video we're going to explore
what they are and how you can implement them in your organization. This video is
a great video to explore why we'd have a Quality Assurance Management System and
is a good introduction to what we've got included in our ISO 9001 Essentials
course right here on our Training Academy. The strategic decision that you
make to implement a Quality Assurance Management System following something
like ISO 9001, I believe and we believe here at Best Practice is critical to the
efficient execution of your business plan so what i'm going to explore in
this video is the ten critical success factors that really are the focus points
the why if you like of your Quality Assurance Management System. When
measures are applied to your organization like good quality indicators
of success, there's an old saying what gets watched gets managed, so the thread
that you'll find as we discuss each of these ten critical success factors is
that we're looking to think about what would we monitor and measure or what
would we measure as an indicator of how well we're tracking and our level of
success. So you Quality Management System can get some really good wins if you
like in the early stages of development, if you take that strategic viewpoint and
link it to your business plan link it to the corporate objectives of the
organization you're going to get a really good onboarding of everybody
involved and success factor number one is really looking at leadership, top
management commitment and defining accountability, roles and
responsibilities and I think ultimately what we want to be looking at and
understanding is that organizations are made up of people and it's really
important to have all of those players on the team well assembled into their
positions. So if you can think about the analogy of a football team we've got a
whole bunch of players on the field they've got their positions now of
course they can move around those positions but we don't want to move off
their positions and a management system that's designed to execute your business
plan is no different to that. We're thinking about the players we've got on
the field or that individual people in the organization, we're thinking about
where they're responsible for and what they're accountable for and then we're
starting to build systems to hold them accountable for obviously provide the
resources they need to execute their responsibilities but then hold them accountable to
that through the process so it's top management it's your first strike at
saying yes this is our business plan this is our strategy you might do that
with some company wide or organization wide communications, meetings, inductions
training and then starting to specify to people well here's your roles and
responsibilities. So classic scenarios are an organizational chart that starts
to show the communication structure within the business and then individual
position descriptions so each of the five teams here at Best Practice
marketing, sales, finance, operations, HR, each of those teams have each got a team
described description which describes all the duties that that team undertakes
and then we move those down to the next level which is the individual position
and descriptions of each person so setting the tone, setting the culture and
living the tone and the culture at an executive level is really important and
the first success factor that we'd be focusing on. In our ISO 9001 Essentials
course we explore in detail ISO 9001's requirements around top management
commitment and we talked about accountabilities and responsibilities so
check out that course it's got some great stuff where we explore the intent
of the clauses of the standard and how you might go about developing your
management system or understanding how your management system has been
developed to meet that requirement. Success factor number three well that's
communication if I did a survey of your organization I asked you this question,
what do you think the number one problem or the number one frustration is in your
organization across the board? And I could almost bet that you're going to
say communication. What I've observed and it makes me a little bit frustrated is
lots of organizations in the ISO 9001 Quality Assurance world have put way too
much effort into developing policies and procedures and in fact I was talking to
my brother yesterday he's frustrated with his team because he said I put a
policy in place and no one follows it. Well of course they don't because as humans
the vast majority of us are turned to effective communication methods to
absorb our information and one of the cool things about what I'm doing for you
right now is not only am I communicating to you verbally, but you're reading as
part of that communication all my body language and it's inspiring you so I can
more effectively get my message across to you in this
type of medium. It's really hard to write a document and convey this much emotion
and enthusiasm and we're not professional writers and we're not
trained to be professional writers like the amazing bestselling authors that
write beautiful novels so what we want to be thinking about is well what
is their most effective way to communicate and not only that, more
importantly, we want to be thinking about our teams and our audience out in the
business. What is the most effective way to communicate to them, how do they want
to be communicated to and you don't necessarily need to ask them but you
could watch, watch what they do in their lunch break, watch the style of
communication that they're consuming on their way to work or their way home from
work on their commute. I can almost guarantee a vast majority of people
consuming information now they're using what? They're using a smartphone and
they're watching video, because humans like to consume eye contact, they like to
hear vocal tone and inflection, they like colors, and they like moving pictures. So
with regards to communication one of the most critical success factors in your
Quality Assurance System is thinking about effective communication so don't
go and write thousands of policies and procedures, have a think about your
audience. Okay success factor number four is all
about looking at who might be the best people in the business to help you with
how you're going to do things and how your going to improve things and it's widely
acknowledged that innovation comes from within organizations. A critical success
factor of Management System and it could be Quality Assurance Management System
it's been built around ISO 9001 is communication consultation or
consultation of the people doing the work. So often while they might not have
the solutions they can definitely discuss things like what's really
frustrating, what doesn't work well and maybe the small adjustments that need to
be made you know in your customer service or your processing or your
manufacturing or your project management or your building site or your pipeline
company whatever industry you might be in. If we were to look at measuring the
numbers of hours that we spend consulting with our teams, instead of the
top-down approach, so it's a it's a bottom-up approach of what things could
we innovate in the organization that's a great question put it out to the
organization, what do you think we could innovate? What
could be improved? What could be some efficiencies? Because you will find, and
I've heard it a lot, regular comments from people so much
money gets wasted or so much time gets wasted or it's so frustrating and so
those are little indicators, so don't necessarily look to hear the solutions
from within the business but they can be little signals and little communications
of things that could be improved in the organization so the leader might set the
strategic direction and then the team come along with all less more micro
suggestions about how each of those things within that within that division
of the business can be you know improved at a micro level. So I can definitely say
that success factor number four is one of the most critical parts of looking at
communication and consultation with workers in the organization and asking
for suggestions for innovation or areas that need attention. Now we explore
what's involved in that as we go clause by clause through ISO 9001 in our ISO
9001 Essentials Training Course. Success factor the number five is all about the
allocation of resources and the one thing that I think is probably most
frustrating for most people in organizations is hearing the words "we
don't have budget for that", so one of the critical success factors is
understanding money that's invested or people or time or equipment, that they're
utilized for a good return on that investment and so success factor is all
about looking at allocation and utilization of resources, so if you're
responsible for budget or time or you've got the ability to make autonomous
decisions it's really critical in any organization to be ensuring that you're
efficiently allocating resources and effectively, effectively is the key word
here, effectively allocating resources to improve levels of customer satisfaction,
improve customer service and improve your customers ability to feel love, joy
and surprise when they're engaging with your organization. Success factor
number six, now we're getting down the list we've got ten success factors that
we're going to go through in this series of videos, but success factor number six
well it's the first time that I'm going to introduce documents, now you can see
it's all the way down the list, it's past halfway so if you could get through all
those other five success factors you're gonna have a great Quality Assurance or
Quality Management System. Now this is the first time where I'll say it's
important for your policies if you've got
written documented policies or policy is about a strategic intent, so if you go
into a Wikipedia search of policy you can have a look at what the intended
policy is you know is our position on something it's not necessarily a
document so we've sort of lost our way on what policy means but, if you're going
to be going a writing policy very important to ensure that there's a neat
little match between the strategic direction or the strategic plan for the
organization, the business plan, and those policies and when they mismatch
there in congruent and it gets confusing for everybody in the organization.
Success factor number six and I'm not going to dwell on it for too long, is all
about how to link your policies and it's all about linking your policies with the
strategic direction of your organization. Please don't get too caught up in
developing lots of documents, policies and procedures, if you've one more detail
in terms of how to look at ISO 9001 and go through and understand resource
allocation and how that all works, our ISO 9001 Essentials course takes you
step-by-step through ISO 9001 and building, developing and maintaining a
Quality Assurance Management System. Success factor number seven in a Quality
Assurance Management System would be looking at the effectiveness of your
controls, the controls that you've identified to manage your risks. So
risk-based thinking approach to developing your strategic plan in your
organization, your SWOT analysis, your business plan and then looking at the
effectiveness of the controls. So if something's always happening that's
negative or there's this customer complaint
always comes up, there are good indicators that the controls that you
have in place are failing. So having a think about and analyzing and recording
and reporting the indicators around, you know, common complaints, common issues, you
know recalls, product faults, defects, service faults, service problems, people
issues, customer issues, all those sorts of things that you could record and
report on, how can we improve customer satisfaction, how can we minimize
customer complaints, what could we do to improve the customers experience, what
could we implement to improve the customers experience and implementation
and execution is a critical part here it's implementing and executing the
positive activities, the preventative actions
to manage the risks the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
that you identified in your SWOT analysis or your risk assessment, as you
built out your business plan in your strategic plan. So that's critical
success factor number seven, as we finish off the critical success factors that
are involved in any good Quality Assurance Management System and there's
something to focus on, that one of the most important things, and I'd argue that
it's the, the most important thing and the first thing you should focus on is
your dashboards. So critical success factor is your ability to effectively
have a good quality monitoring and measurement and KPI system. Here at Best
Practice we have a huge dashboard where we start to look at tracking the
performance and reporting that performance on a weekly basis across our
organization, so if you're a senior manager or a senior leader in a business,
it's really important to understand that this part of your Quality Assurance
Management System is the feedback loop for how well your business plan is going.
What does the dashboard look like, in this business we look at PNL's, balance
sheets, expenses, receivables, utilization, sales, marketing, all the costs that are
part of a PNL, but more importantly we look at the lead indicators, we look at
things like touch points from marketing, we look at you know touch points in a
sales process, we look at the success factors with the delivery of our services.
You know one of the critical success factors and the things to focus on to
achieve a desired outcome from implementing management system just have
a really good quality dashboard that you keep innovating and keep evolving and
keep improving so that you can keep going through that process to understand
the clear picture of your organization's performance and it's one of the core
elements of a successful Quality Assurance Management System.
If you're just getting into ISO 9001, you're monitoring and measurement is a
key part, the dashboard is a key part of measuring how effective your management
system is, measuring the clear picture of the organization's performance. So if
there's a team of managers above you in the organization have asked you to help
with a Quality Management System or they've asked you to help with ISO 9001
have a think about what the reporting dashboard looks like. The intent is that
it links to the strategic plan, the business plan of your organization, it
links to and it becomes the graphs and reports and diagrams that track your
ability to achieve your objectives and targets. First question is are there
graphs? And if there are graphs, if there are reports, if there is data being
tracked, are they targets? Objectives and targets and that's a
critical element on one of the most important success factors of any
Management System. The next success factor that we're talking about with the
Quality Assurance Management System is looking at ensuring that your Quality
Assurance System is integrated into your core business processes. Is it integrated?
Is it something that sits over on the side of your organization and you know
every time you ready for an assessment you open it up, blow the dust off it, or
is it something that's fully embedded in how you do business on a day to day
basis, so it's really important and probably a great question for you when
you're looking at the Management System you have in place if you have an ISO
9001 Management System in place and you're looking at it and reading it and
studying it and saying this doesn't make any sense let me ask you this question,
are those policies and procedures and documents that have been developed or
the website or whatever it might be, is that business as imagined? Or is that
business as you observe today? Because it is important to understand the
difference, sometimes we do write stuff and record stuff and develop stuff
because that's the imaginary business in the future, what we want to do is we want
to capture how we're doing things now so we can analyze it, improve it and control it
and you could talk about define, measure, analyze, improve, control as being one of
those things, so have a think about that but it's really important to make sure
that your Quality Assurance System is part of business on a day to day basis.
If you need help with that and you want to feel more confident, go check out the
ISO 9001 Essentials course in our Training Academy ,the links below in the
description. The very last success factor in this
series of videos is talking about objectives and targets, we're talking
about ensuring that the objectives and targets align with the policies the
policies align with the business and the Quality Management System is part of
business on a day to day basis, so it brings it all together, so my question to
you is, what could you do in your organization to ensure that customers,
customer satisfaction, business improvement and innovation are part of
your day to day activities? What could you do, or what types of communication
could you implement? Who could be involved in discussing that process,
improving that process, innovating that process, improving customer satisfaction?
And ultimately ask yourself the question, why does your organization exist? So when
you understand why your organization exists, it can form part of the overall
filter for the improvement of your organization on a day to day basis but
more importantly, improving the customers experience so that so you're focusing on
helping them to feel love, joy and surprise in every single touch
point that they've got with your business, the last thing you want is a
frustrated customer, because they won't keep coming back and when customers keep
coming back it's just good for business. So I hope these videos have been
fantastic for you, if you want more information and you want some in-depth
understanding of what's involved in ISO 9001 and how to feel more confident and
competent and go step by step through ISO 9001 as a standard, maybe use it
for Internal Auditing, maybe you've got a developer management system, you might be
new to this, you might be an executive that just needs a refresher, the ISO 9001
Essentials training course prepared by Best Practice is absolutely fantastic, we
had a lot of fun putting it together, the link for that course is below in the
description, go check it out, you might find that you really enjoy it but I can
definitely guarantee it's going to help you improve your organization so it's
fun, sustainable, safe and a great place for your customers and your staff to do
business on a day to day basis we'll see you there.