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14th Jun 10
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The importance of managing for quality cannot be over-emphasized, the reason for business is the customer. Quality products and services are those that fully meet the requirements of customers. Total customer and stakeholder satisfaction is the goal of every well run organization. Only organizations managed in this way have hope for survival in the long-run. The over-riding objective of total quality management is total customer satisfaction. Success in managing for quality requires planning for quality and this is the first step in any quality improvement programme. Planning for quality requires a number of steps, the first of these steps is discussed here which is selecting the product or service that needs improvement.
This step is information-driven, request of suggestion for improvement has to be initiated somewhere. A number of steps are necessary to arrive at this decision.
A) Product or service improvement suggestion. Information sources include:
1) Stakeholders. One of the major benefits of inclusive stakeholder engagement is idea generation, authentic information for product or service improvement flow regularly into the company from the stakeholder engagement process. This is for companies that have stakeholder engagement strategy that accept stakeholders as partners and include all categories of stakeholders not just those in the supplier-customer chain in their planning and execution of projects and programmes.
2) Feedback from the field through sales reps
3) Suggestion boxes
4) Websites FAQs and company blogs
5) Social media
6) Customers relations fora
7) The introduction of a new machine or process
Sheer interest to try something new
9) Internal research efforts.
10) Competition
11) Suppliers and other members of the supplier-customer chain etc.
B) Data Collection. When a product or service is so identified, more data will then be collected to verify and understand the situation more closely and ascertain the extent of deviation from desired standard. There are many data collection methods available for this purpose some of which are
1) Surveys
2) Questionnaire
3) Check sheets
4) Interviewing etc.
C) The cause of the problem should then be established using methods such as cause and effect analysis.
D) Collected data will have to be analyzed and displayed appropriately to produce meaningful information for easy understanding. There are many data analysis and presentation techniques that can be used such as
1) Pareto analysis
2) Histogram
3) Control charts
4) Scatter diagrams
5) Force field analysis etc.
The whole essence of these activities is to target the product or service for quality improvement. Usually there will be many competing for selection, the potential for value addition should be the over-riding determining factor. This is the first step in planning for quality.
u><�� ��&��$on the responses to the questions gathered, the scores are tabulated using a spreadsheet tool and presented. A maturity-based assessment may use the 5-level ITSM maturity model to rate the individual process. Spider diagrams or bar charts can be used to compare current state with desired state and highlight key gaps and deficiency areas. Benchmarks with the maturity levels of other companies in same industries are useful and that is one advantage of engaging external consultants to perform the assessment instead of conducting a self assessment. Gaps, issues, constraints should be identified as compared to the vision, mission, goals and objectives. The analysis should include highlighting potential risks to the quality and reliability of current service delivery.
Step 6: Action Planning
Having understood the current state versus the desired state and armed with the information obtained in the earlier steps, viable solution approaches would need to be identified, including products and services that are needed. An IT service improvement initiative may require multiple sub-projects to address what needs to be done at each step of way. Each project should be defined with a possible project scope or charter, estimated time line and costs, products and services.
Step 7: Presentation
The presentation should not be a lengthy session to discuss the details of the assessment or findings. Instead, it should be a high level, executive presentation focusing on key pain-points uncovered, business implications and what are the recommended solutions and next steps. The desired outcome is to seek sponsorship and approval from the management team to proceed with service improvement action plans.
Step 8: Produce the Assessment Report
A formal assessment report should be produced. The aim of this report is to document the objectives of the assessment, key findings, issues uncovered and solutions proposed. This document is important as it serves as the baseline upon which comparisons of the “before” and “after” snapshots of the situation can be made subsequently.
Tags: management
