Part2: From Chaos to Consistency: Establishing QMS in Startup Environments
Drishti Tyagi
A Quality and Process Management professional with 10+yrs in IT industry and an independently practicing children's Library Educator.
Do we think of a quality management system (QMS) at the initial stage of building the organization or do we wait till we have reached a particular milestone? This dilemma comes when we see QMS as a huge step which needs a lot of “separate” dedicated time and resources. But what we forget is that focus on quality cannot be separated from the work that the team is doing and if we do separate it, it is at our own peril. As mentioned in the earlier article, quality is everyone's responsibility and that is what helps in delivering value to customers, internal and external. The challenge is how do we go about achieving this without derailing our day-to-day operations.
Below is a proposed implementation blueprint which is a distilled version of best ideas in building quality systems.
1.#QualityCulture - Build an understanding of quality and its importance within the teams through conversations. Create a buy-in from every individual to walk and talk about quality in their work and deliverables.
2.#CurrentProcesses - Encourage teams to record their current way of working, the processes they follow in a simple to use and centralized web page/tool/document. This will build transparency in workflow and be the starting point to have practical discussions around delivering quality to customers.
3.#ValueToCustomer - Guide and facilitate teams to identify their internal and external customers. Identify the processes that provide the highest value to each customer.
4.#IdentifyProblemsSolutions - Along with teams look at the processes that provide highest value to customers and identify a list of problems and challenges currently faced by?the teams. Encourage solutions and ideas from the team.
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5.#RiskBasedPriority -?Guide and facilitate teams to prioritize solutions based on the extent of risk the problem poses and create a plan of action to address these collaboratively.
6.#ImplementToolsProcesses - Guide and facilitate teams to implement the solutions by adding/enhancing tools and processes. Incorporate key measures to show the effectiveness of the solution.
7.#ReviewMeasureData - Guide and facilitate teams to review the processes and analyze the data collected for further improvement.
8.#ContinuouslyImprove - Focus on continuously delivering value, learning and adapting, identifying areas of improvement and ensuring the quality management system reflects your way of working.
Building an early quality management system is an act of preventive measure that drastically helps in reducing risks that may arise due to employee churn, changes in customer needs and requirements, unforeseen product/service incidents, organizational changes, innovations and more. The key to building such a system is to identify processes adding immediate value to customers, identifying problems or areas of improvement and prioritizing them based on risk. This will help build a minimum viable process to deliver the maximum value to customers.