Does your procedure approval process involve the Board or the CEO and take months to get anything reviewed and approved? Do you find yourself waiting for the next meeting so you can present your idea or get sign off for your project? Sometimes as a quality manages it can feel as though you face a wall of bureaucracy at every turn. The nature of the quality role generally involves working collaboratively but this can mean that ideas go through at least one committee and sometimes several.
Quality managers can become frustrated when they raise ideas and then have to spend hours writing a business case to show why their idea is worth investing in, only to be told it’s not a strategic propriety at the moment.
After a while it can feel like you are banging your head against a brick wall and you can start to question why you were ever employed at all if your expertise isn’t going to be given a chance to innovate and implement.
In my experience frustration is one of the biggest problems faced by people in a quality role. There are a number of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the relationship between quality and compliance.
The person in the quality role is often the person who deals with external stakeholders like certification bodies, funders and customers who communicate their needs through funding agreements, audits and contracts. This person is on the frontline at audit time, answering questions, looking for evidence to ‘prove’ the organisation meets the standard and facing the criticism if systems are found wanting.
Trying to communicate the importance of meeting these requirements to the leadership team can sometimes fall on deaf ears and you are left wondering ‘why do I bother”. It is not uncommon for a quality manager to report to the leadership team that the organisation is not meeting their contractual responsibilities and yet nothing changes. In extreme situations safety risks are ignored because the solution is costly or resource intensive.
Sometimes it can feel to the quality team like the only thing that will force action is when the external stakeholder calls to say they are coming to do an audit. We have all experienced the mad flurry of activity in preparation for the auditors.
Is it possible for organisation to adopt an agile approach to quality and trust in the quality role to make decisions?
In the Forbes article “How to make the whole organisation agile” Steve Denning says an agile leader trusts in the judgement and wisdom of those in touch with the customer. The quality role is a perfect example of a person who has a deep understanding of customer’s needs.
Problems arise when the leadership team don’t trust the quality position to make sound business decisions. This problem can be easily overcome when the leadership team has a sound understanding of quality systems, are involved in designing the systems and can therefore recruite a person they know can do the work. When the leadership team know what work needs to be done they can monitor where things are working and where they are not. This gives them the confidence to develop a more agile approach to quality.
Quality systems need to provide value and with an agile system there can be a more responsive approach to customer needs.
It’s not right for every organisation though and at least three common factors need to be in place to support an agile quality system:
A competent quality manager
This person needs to have a good understanding of strategic and business processes. Ideally the position will sit within the leadership team and be involved in strategic and business decision making on a regular basis to ensure they are fully informed of the direction and interests of their key stakeholder (the leadership team).
Strong reporting and communication
Leaders and those in the quality role need an environment where accountabilities and tasks are clearly delegated and where reporting mechanisms are in place to provide assurance to each stakeholder that projects are running effectively, and key tasks are being competed to manage risk.
An agile leader
In their article Embracing Agile the authors say leaders who don’t understand agile principles manage inappropriately. These executives launch countless initiatives with urgent deadlines rather than assign the highest priority to two or three. They spread themselves and their best people across too many projects. They schedule frequent meetings and many of them become overly involved in the work of individual teams. They talk more than listen. They promote marginal ideas that a team has previously considered and back-burnered. They routinely overturn team decisions and add review layers and controls to ensure that mistakes aren’t repeated. With the best of intentions, they erode the benefits that agile innovation can deliver.
This management approach can feel very familiar to quality managers; too many meetings, being talked at, too many projects, decisions overturned and too many controls.
When you look at your organisation do you have an agile system?
Is your quality system more Tyrannosaurus Rex than self-driving car?
In an age where competition is stronger than ever, where ideas change so quickly, and regulators want more confidence in your systems than ever before how are you as a leadership team working to be agile not just in making money but in providing quality.