Can you remember how excited you were when you got the new quality manager role at the great organisation. You were so frustrated at your old job because of the ineffective quality management system and now this place offers to be the utopia of quality management. Everyone at interview told you how the leadership team have a focus on quality and that the organisation is passionate about quality outcomes and boy are you ready for his.
It doesn’t take long to realise though that the system you had in your old job was much more advanced than the one they have here.
This can lead to a feeling of disappointment and anxiety as you realise you are going to have to build this baby from the ground up, and you don’t know where to start. At least when you started your old job most of it was already in place and you were really just tweaking.
Before long you find yourself Googling “purchasing procedure” in a panic when asked to write one and wishing you had stayed in your old job.
Then you have a great idea, didn’t they have a purchasing procedure at the old place? You search your computer and find it and are ready to present it to the leadership team the very next day.
Feeling very proud of yourself you can’t quite understand why everyone is not as pleased as you when it comes to implementation…….
I had this exact story happen to a client of mine, in fact I have heard this story from many of the quality managers I work with. The problem is that quality system don’t always easily transfer across organisation.
Organiations have their own unique culture, their own personality; and processes need to be written not only to match or build on these but also need to consider the size and structure of the organisation.
When you design a quality management system these are some of the things the leadership and quality manger need to consider in partnership.
This is just one reason why leaders cannot simply delegate the design of their quality system.
Going back to my friend and client in the story above. When I read the procedure they have placed in front of the team I wasn’t surprised they had met with resistance. The previous organisation had been a large national service with sites across several states. The new organisation had one site.
The process for purchasing at the old job involved a request for tender with a 14-page document to be completed by the manager requesting the extra resource. The would-be supplier then had to fill in another 12 page document and supply referees, insurance and work cover documents.
All of this then had to be approved by a regional manager before contracts were drawn up.
In the new much smaller organisation they needed a more simple and agile approach. They had few suppliers and many of these were built on local connections and relationships. They often didn’t have time to seek out multiple quotes and were happy with a local and trusted supplier.
Rightly people pushed back at the extra work that had be created.
So what should my friend and client have done?
1. Talk to people about what they do
2. Find out why they do it that way
3. Discover whether it is working for them or not
4. Identify any risks or breaches of compliance
5. Explore some other best practice options
You can then draft up a procedure for consultation and present a final draft to the leadership team. It’s a good idea to trial the new process before evaluating it and then rolling it out as a new and approved way of working.
Your quality system is like the diamond at the center the organisation, its unique and special and can’t be replicated.
Transferring your old process won’t always work but talking to people in your new job about how and why they do it and working together to get it right will help you with buy in and make everyone life that little bit easier.
For more reading on getting buy in you can get great practical tips in the book by Simon Dowling