Part four:
Assurance
Repositioning
the Profession
Assurance in
the 21st century
Assurance
Leadership
Governance
Assurance
Improvement
Leadership
Governance
Assurance
Improvement
Context
Context
Acknowledgements
The CQI thanks the following who contributed to the
development of this document and associated content:
• The CQI Professional Policy Panel (PPP)
• The CQI PPP market testing group
• The quality leader interviewees
• The CQI Branches and Special Interest Groups
• The CQI Advisory Council
• Mike Turner, CQP MCQI, managing partner, Oakland Consulting
•Professor John Oakland, CQP FCQI, chairman, Oakland Consulting
and founder of The Oakland Institute for Business Research and Education
•Katey Twyford, associate researcher, The Oakland Institute for
Business Research and Education
Contents
2
3
4
6
12
13
15
16
19
20
22
23
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Delivering assurance
Systems that succeed
Identifying and managing risk
Planning to deliver value and protect reputation
Putting a value on corporate social responsibility
Working with partners
Generating better reliability in partnership with our customers
Building a culture of ‘continuous assurance’ through competence
Summary
Bibliography
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Introduction
Assurance
In October 2014 the CQI published a document entitled The New Quality Professional Challenge1.
The purpose of that publication was to present the case for a change in the role and value delivered
by the quality profession. It also outlined a vision for the quality profession as a compelling strategic
business management function that helps organisations to sustain and thrive.
Leadership
Governance
Assurance
Improvement
Leadership
Governance
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Improvement
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Context
This vision comprised a statement of our professional brand, a description of our unique skill set (The Quality
Leadership
Skills framework) and the key factors that must be achieved to deliver this vision (Critical Success Factors).
Introduction
Assurance in a changing world
Now
that this
skills framework
has been
published
quality.org/Competency-Framework
for a description) the
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capability required of the people and the partners [2]. This all becomes meaningless, however, if the setup is not
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Governance, Assurance, Improvement and Context, defined as:
• Governance – How quality professionals use the right approaches
to create plans, polices and processes that deliver strategic goals,
working to harness the entire organisation to meet all shareholder
and stakeholder expectations
• Assurance – How quality professionals provide the invaluable
confidence that these plans, policies and processes are effectively
implemented to minimise and manage risk and sustain reputation
• Improvement – How quality professionals enable and facilitate
organisation-wide learning and improvement
• Context – How quality professionals use domain and/or industry
knowledge and understanding essential for the implementation and
sustenance of the above.
As has been the practice for all publications to date, this series has been informed by interviews with senior quality
In recent years we have seen many well-publicised examples of the absence of effective assurance activities and
professionals from a range of private and public sector organisations. In semi-structured interviews, each respondent
the disastrous consequences that can develop, including the serious impact on reputations. These have ranged from
was asked a series of questions relating to their experience of these four key areas of competence. This series of
companies simply failing to deliver products and services that meet established and accepted customer requirements,
publications will make direct reference to their experiences, as well as using them to inform conclusions.
through to phone hacking by members of the press, overstating of profits in the retail sector, banks involved in a
range of misdemeanours, falsification of product performance data – and even to the claiming of excessive expenses
Given that all we do as managers must be in relation to the context in which we operate, this series star ts
by MPs. The effects of these occurrences in the modern world can quickly become global news.
with “knowing your business – the importance of context”. Organisations and countries throughout the
world have experienced and continue to experience huge change, politically, economically, socially and
The Repositioning the Profession series has been informed by interviews with senior quality professionals from
through
technological
developments.
a range of
private and public
sector organisations. In semi-structured interviews, each respondent was asked a
set of questions relating to their experience of the key areas of competence within the framework. As in the
quality.org
previous parts in the series, this part makes direct reference to their experiences, as well as using them to inform
conclusions. This contributes to understanding the complexities of assuring quality in the 21st century.
3: Knowing your business: the importance of context
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Delivering assurance
Quality professionals clearly have a key role to play in delivering assurance for their organisation, its customers
and other external stakeholders. This work involves process assurance activities to ensure the defined policies
and standards are deployed. It usually involves establishing a good system for managing the organisation and then
auditing and reviewing the operation, with top management, to ensure it works as planned and gets even better.
The ability to work with teams in partnership, often at senior levels, both inside and outside the organisation is
key to successful assurance. That work includes setting the context, providing insight and advice, raising effective
challenges and confidently driving the organisation to better performance.
Successful assessment, auditing and review that leaves top management and the rest of the organisation feeling
good about this complex task is a major assurance challenge, especially if they are not going to be left with the
perception that it is only about compliance. The outcomes must be
consistent with all the stakeholder needs and this can be achieved if
the focus is on capability rather than control.
Ian McCabe, head of quality at Nuvia, positions this very well
in terms of customer expectations: “The client is telling us their
perspective of what good quality looks like in terms of what they
wish to buy. They’re talking about behaviours and how we work, as
much as the product, because they expect, as a minimum, that we’re
going to deliver a defect-free piece of engineering that doesn’t
cause harm. What we are being asked is what type of company are
we? And, why should clients partner with us over the long term?”
Ian McCabe
Winning confidence and trust inside and outside the organisation
The following ‘areas to be addressed’ should provide an enlightened approach to assurance that delivers the
right outcomes:
• Put the customer at the heart of the business, ie remain focussed on their needs and expectations when
managing the business. Steve Williams, system and governance manager at leading assurance provider LRQA
says: “It has been one of the objectives of the board to put the customer at the heart of everything that we
do, because obviously the customer is key as far as we’re concerned. We are a service organisation so our
customers are the most important thing. If we don’t keep them happy they vote with their feet and they go
to another provider.”
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• Show that you are listening to your customers. At Vodafone they focus quality on the front-line team.
Jackie Jessamy-Fuller, quality manager for service assurance, said that her focus is the team’s individual
interface with their customers. They ask, “What is quality doing to improve my life and to improve my
customer experience?” Jessamy-Fuller describes how driving customer experience is one of their strategic
targets, with the focus from the frontline being to increase the customer experience. They also do a great
deal of their measurement through customer feedback.
• Assure quality and reduce risk for all the stakeholders, from the beginning of the process right through
to the end. The keystone of assuring quality is the concept of customer and supplier working together for
their mutual advantage. For any particular organisation this becomes ‘total quality’ if the supplier/customer
interfaces extend beyond the immediate customers, back inside the organisation, and beyond into the
supply chain and contractors. This is particularly important in complex project-based businesses such as the
construction-related industries. The actions and activities of
each stakeholder to make the project a success need to be
identified right at the outset, together with how this success
will be measured. Ian Mills, head of quality at Balfour Beatty,
explains: “Our business has established the customer at the
heart. That has been supported by training and coaching
events on how to work with customers to understand their
needs from their perspective.”
• Take a walk through your value chain and see it from the
perspective of your customers. A prime example of this is
from the NHS, where the patient pathway is reviewed to
ensure the patient has a purposeful and timely experience
of service. This requires all processes to be reviewed to
ensure they provide for ‘flow’, promote the use of evidencebased practice and deliver value. At the Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Foundation Trust, patient stories
have become a critical element of delivering assurance and supporting the improvement journey. A good
example of this is its ‘Dementia’ pathway. The stories painted a picture of concern over the number of
different touchpoints required for an accurate diagnosis and the total time taken. The Trust worked with GPs,
patients and their families to get all of the necessary tests booked as soon as possible, and with the Acute
teams to try and schedule all of the tests on one day. That way, patients may receive a diagnosis within the
target time and with as few visits to hospital as necessary.
• Measure and improve process variation, control and capability. The use of Statistical Process Control (SPC)
[3] methods and techniques allows organisations and their suppliers to understand the nature and extent of
variation in their processes, which can be a real killer of quality. It is essential to collect and analyse process
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data and to bring all key processes into statistical control. The resulting information can then be used to
determine process capability, identify and remove causes of variation, and signpost key areas for improvement.
One respondent from the automotive sector said: “We use SPC down the supply chain so, within the DFMEA
(design for failure mode and ffects Analysis), we have identified significant and critical characteristics, and we
insist that the [process capability indices] CPs are above 1.6 and CPKs are above one.”
Systems that succeed
Across all industries worldwide, the value of formal management systems in assuring quality has been widely
questioned and it is small wonder. In some countries, government policy has simply been to mandate certification
against the ISO 9000 family of standards for all government suppliers. Consequently, the managers within some
companies saw the need to obtain ISO 9000 series certification only as a necessary hurdle to getting onto
government tender lists and, hence, primarily as a marketing
problem. In these cases, where senior management gave the issue
scant attention, marketing and/or other managers hired a consultant
to develop and deliver a compliant system.
In order to assure quality properly, however, a company must
organise itself in such a way that the human, administrative and
technical factors affecting quality will be under control. This leads
to the requirement for the development and implementation
of a quality (or more appropriately named, integrated business)
management system that enables the objectives set out in the
policies and strategies to be accomplished. Clearly, for maximum
effectiveness and to meet individual customer requirements, any
management system in use must be appropriate to the type of
activity and product or service being offered.
How systems add value
A good business management system or quality management system (BMS/QMS) will ensure that two important
requirements are continually met:
• The customer’s requirements – for confidence in the ability of the organisation to deliver the desired
product or service consistently.
• The organisation’s requirements – both internally and externally, including the statutory and regulatory
context within which the organisation operates, and at an optimum cost, with efficient utilisation of the
resources deployed, be that material, human, technological, environmental (including working environment)
or information.
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The requirements can be truly met only if objective evidence is provided, in the form of information and data,
which supports the system activities from the ultimate supplier through to the ultimate customer. The quality
professional must help top management demonstrate leadership and commitment with respect to assurance
and the BMS/QMS. This should be evident through their:
• taking accountability for the effectiveness of the BMS/QMS
• ensuring that the quality policy and quality objectives are established for the BMS/QMS and are compatible
with the context and strategic direction of the organisation
• ensuring the integration of the BMS/QMS requirements into the organisation’s business processes
• promoting the use of a process approach and risk-based thinking
• ensuring that the resources needed for the BMS/QMS are available
• communicating the importance of effective quality management and of conforming to the BMS/QMS
requirements
• ensuring that the BMS/QMS achieves its intended results
• engaging, directing and supporting people to contribute to the
effectiveness of the BMS/QMS
• promoting continuous improvement
• supporting other relevant management roles to demonstrate
their leadership, as it applies to their areas of responsibility.
The aim of the necessity to focus on customer needs and specify
them as defined requirements for the organisation is clearly to
achieve customer confidence in the products or services provided.
Nigel Croft
The components of a fit-for-purpose 21st century quality
management system
Assurance is about ensuring that the defined requirements are understood and fully met, so it is important to:
• Get a balanced set of indicators that provide assurance. The use of balanced scorecards was referred
to frequently in our interviews with senior leaders in the quality profession. According to Nigel Croft,
chairman of ISO TC176/SC2 for Quality Systems, it is important for all boards and top management
teams to look beyond just the financial report, and to consider other aspects, such as social and
environmental reporting, and their potential impact on reputation and business performance. The head of
quality in a leading automotive company says: “The massive thing for most companies is measuring ‘cost
of quality’, but so few adopt it. Within our industry standard it is actually stipulated that a company shall
measure and understand the cost of poor quality and I have found personally that, if you want to wake
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up senior management teams to focus in on quality, once you put it into pound or dollar value, it certainly
makes people sit up in their chairs.”
• Focus on process assurance as well as product assurance. This is especially important in a services or
‘manu-services’ [involves the manufacture of goods and the provision of after-sales service] environment
where the ‘product’ is a combination of tangible and intangible outcomes. Paul Bunting, environmental health
safety and quality manager at the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (Nuclear AMRC),
noted in the context of that business: “The lines between product and process are becoming increasingly
blurred. The processes that run that piece of research or that development programme are the ones that
underpin it and, therefore, it’s about getting those processes right so that the product comes right at the
end.” So often, managers focus too much on trying to monitor and fix the outcomes, rather than building
process and people capability.
• Work to reduce the potential causes of failure. Croft
notes that in ISO 9001:2015 the production and service
provision process requirements contain elements of
automation, foolproofing etc, that form the basis of a robust
assurance approach. He says: “I don’t see process and system
approaches as two separate things. My suggestion would
be to look at the description of the quality management
principles described in ISO 9000:2015, one of which says,
‘Consistent and predictable results are achieved more
effectively and efficiently when activities are understood and
managed as interrelated processes that function as a coherent
system’. The quality profession really has a role as translator,
putting ‘technical quality language’ and concepts into the
context of the business in which they are working – in simple
terms that top management and all levels of management can identify with.”
• Work hard to get a good baseline for your metrics. At the Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Foundation Trust
they believe in the importance of observation in establishing and maintaining this accurate baseline. Director
of operations Adele Coulthard speaks of the importance of “teaching people how to observe, how to see
things, in order to measure appropriately”. At Leonardo MW Electronic Warfare Lines of Business a metrics
pack is delivered to the board. Head of quality Gary Illingworth says: “The metrics pack is used to monitor
business performance, but ownership and business improvement is driven through the operational guys on
the shop floor.”
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• Obtain sufficient resources to deploy the chosen approach for assurance. Efficiency drives can lead to a
reduction in the resources deemed affordable. Clearly, over-resourcing risks the quality function being seen
in a ‘policing’ role, with the attendant abrogation of responsibility for ‘quality at source’, ie putting quality in
the hands of those producing it, but too few can generate risks to the business. How do organisations find
the balance point? A number are mapping quality activities across the entire value chain and using the output
to scope and size the resources required. Christopher Elliott, head of quality and configuration management
policy at the MoD, is acutely aware of the importance of finding this balance point. He argues that the
efficiency agenda demands that roles cover a number of different disciplines, while the ever-increasing
demand for specialist approaches leads to a division of labour. Achieving this balance is a constant challenge.
• Develop your own approach to assurance, based on the specific context of the business. The variety that
so many businesses need to manage in their valued outcomes has led a number of companies to develop
business management systems that allow specific projects
or product/services to vary practice within a framework of
governance and risk management. Williams sees this as a
critical element of developing the right approach to assurance.
He says: “You have to understand what you are doing, who
you are doing it for and what the risks are of not delivering
what your customer wants.” Neil Anderson, managing director
at Caterpillar Skinningrove, says his organisation designed
a bespoke QMS, developed from the best of a number of
different approaches, as a consequence of finding that no
single approach provided the levels of assurance that its
customers required.
Neil Anderson
• Assess the maturity of the organisation to handle the
chosen assurance approach. Croft has observed how
important this is – he describes how a ‘quality at source’ approach to assurance worked well where there
was a strong quality culture led from the top, but how it failed in a less mature environment where quality
had been driven by the quality function with a policing approach.
• Adopt the principles of target operating model (TOM) design to develop the assurance approach. A
number of companies have used the TOM approach, which encompasses the design of the right processes,
people resources, organisation design, technology, data and partnerships required to deliver the assurance
outcomes necessary and sufficient to deliver the strategic goals. Process design stems from a review of
quality across the value chain, whereby organisations are mapping the quality assurance and control activities
that must take place at every stage and by when these activities will be carried out. In turn, this determines
the skills, experience and capacity needed in process ownership roles, as well as within the formal quality
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department. From that, the best organisation of these roles into teams and areas of responsibility and
accountability is determined. Additionally, the best use of technology and data can be ascertained in order to
drive increased efficiency and effectiveness from the model.
A major automotive manufacturer uses this approach to assure the quality of supplied material and
components to the assembly line. Every supplier is subject to a common set of quality standards, with help
given by in-house technical assistants. These standards are developed right at the start of the design of a
product or variant and set out the processes that will be required (manufacturing and business) to build a
vehicle consistently and reliably.
At Leonardo MW Electronic Warfare, Illingworth has organised his quality team into functional assurance
lead roles that carry out the necessary assurance activities, in concert with the relevant process managers
and project leads. One of their roles is to approve changes
or deviations to the business system as a consequence of the
specific requirements of any one project. This achieves the
right balance of agility with assurance. It enables his team to
build up functional specialisms and, over time, earn credibility
with the business.
• Establish the right points of influence. ‘Quality’ can so often
be called in after the event when it is too late, or too early in
the management cycle, when value-add is not recognised and
there is no recognised role for quality to play (the resurgence
of quality planning is challenging this business assumption).
Illingworth has recognised this and seeks to discover the key
Gary Illingworth
points of influence where a tactical contribution can be made:
“I think quality professionals need to be working at the point
we can influence rather than being over here checking stuff or wheeled in when something’s gone wrong.
Of course, we spend a chunk of time when things have gone wrong but the real cusp of it is to get in where
we can influence what’s going on.” Illingworth has a theory that this is determined by two key factors: the
extent of the changes required to meet variety (termed ‘unplanned changes’) and the extent of functional
assurance required – or inherent risk. Figure 1 (p11) shows a simple correlation whereby, as both of these
factors increase, the potential points of influence increase. Williams notes that, where the quality professional
is integrated into the management team and not seen as on the periphery of the business, its influence on
what goes on in the business improves dramatically.
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Figure 1
Involvement of the quality
professional to add value
Unplanned
Extent of changes
required to meet
variety/variation
POTENTIAL POINTS
OF INFLUENCE
INCREASE
Planned
Extent of functional assurance required (inherent risk)
• Provide up-to-date and accurate data to each point of influence. Anderson describes how he uses data in
the Skinningrove plant: “We have a fantastic system at Caterpillar. Once the shoes are shipped and they are
on a machine or an excavator, they are measured in four ways:
i) 0-20 hours of ownership, which is the first couple of days
ii) 21-200 hours, which is the first two months of ownership
iii) 201-1,000 hours
iv) 1,000 hours or more.
I can go onto the system today and tell you our current figure is one PPM, so that’s one failed shoe and the
hours this defect occurred with a field report. This report tells us all we need to know. We feed this back to
the shop floor with any process changes we deem appropriate. This corrective action, if required, is put in
place with immediate effect.
The automotive industry also collects field warranty data at service points for zero, three, six and 12
months. In addition, it collects customer survey feedback, both from internal processes and from industry
bodies such as JD Power. It also collects data from roadside assistance services and dealer experiences.
Audit feedback, from suppliers right through to dealers, completes the set of data that is fed back into the
design, manufacturing and assembly processes to drive improvement. This minimises the risk of missing the
‘silent error’, ie failure that is not reported.
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Illingworth sums up this approach: “You know you can’t always get engaged at the right point of influence,
sometimes you don’t know when it is, and it’s a very busy environment, but that to me is what assurance is
about – applying it at the right point.”
This simple thinking could be applied across the whole value chain model in order to identify where the quality
team can and must have the most influence. Moreover, it could be expanded into a four-box model that could be
used to identify the extent and nature of influence.
Figure 2
The extent and nature
of influence
Extent of
process change
required to
meet variety
in value chain
outcomes
Functional quality leads
provide peer review for
required changes
Direct intervention by
quality experts at key
points of influence
Business management
system-driven
(concession managed)
Coaching and
supporting functional
leads to manage
assurance activities
Level of functional assurance
required or inherent risk
Identifying and managing risk
Risk management should be an ongoing, organisation-wide process that involves several interrelated components.
Above all, to establish the foundation for effective risk management, the organisation must create an internal
environment or culture that fosters a commitment to competence, provides discipline and articulates governance
structures. With this foundation in place, management can evaluate its strategy and objective-setting approaches to
be certain that, throughout the organisation, business process performance objectives are linked to, and support,
the strategic objectives.
Risk-based thinking is essential for establishing and then maintaining the effectiveness of a BMS or QMS. The
concept of risk-based thinking had been implicit in previous versions of the ISO 9001 standard but the 2015
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version goes much further than this and requires that organisations plan and implement actions to address risks
and opportunities. This provides a basis for improving the effectiveness of the BMS or QMS in delivering assurance
by exploiting opportunities as they appear, improving performance and results and preventing negative effects.
Opportunities might relate to circumstances that allow an organisation to, for example, attract new customers,
develop new products and services, reduce waste or improve productivity. Actions to address opportunities
should also consider any associated risks that are essentially the potential effects of uncertainty and can have
positive or negative implications.
Elliott recounts that at the MoD, risk is seen as everyone’s responsibility. Anyone can and should identify risks
as they see them, it should not be left to a separate team, department or process. They should use a valuation
process to determine levels of criticality and then manage risk at the right level in the business, eg the most
business-critical risks are managed at executive level.
The assurance regime should encompass mitigating actions, ie they
should be tracked through with the same robustness as change
projects and value-adding activities. Williams urges practitioners not
to be too myopic about risk, but instead to keep the ‘big picture’
in mind. He says: “A number of organisations are short-sighted in
their management of risk. They tend to look within the walls of
their organisation and less at what can go wrong in the external
environments that will have an impact on what they do.”
Planning to deliver value and protect reputation
Advanced product quality planning (APQP) is a structured method
of defining and establishing the steps necessary to ensure that a
product satisfies the customer right from the outset of its design. APQP involves 75 per cent upfront planning and
25 per cent implementation through production, to determine customer satisfaction and continuous improvement.
Although APQP is generally associated with the automotive industry, the quality planning processes can be applicable
within all industries and the approach should be easily communicated to design teams and suppliers. For some
years, the automotive industry has been championing the use of APQP in order that customer requirements and
expectations are assured throughout design and production. Quality plans must be developed that cover the end-toend delivery chain, making sure that all necessary steps are taken to deliver a quality product, and setting targets for
improvement. As APQP is a methodology that defines the best practices and tools needed to develop a quality plan,
it forms the core of a defect prevention strategy and is a key element in prioritising areas for improvement activities.
Recently, there has been a resurgence of APQP, with its use extending to other industries.
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One interviewee, who works at a leading company in the automotive sector, insists: “The supplier must complete
their APQP and submit a pack to us as part of our production part approval process. Within that, are the
supplier’s drawings, their design records, their design-for-manufacture records and their records of potential failures
(design and process FMEAs) together with their process capability studies through which they will give us the
hard evidence. We manage it into the supply base in that way and then within our own FMEAs and onto our
own assembly processes. We also identify significant and critical characteristics. We apply SPC (statistical process
control) using either variable or attribute data in our own factories.”
“Once you’ve got some control you must have a solid APQP or solid product development system, together with
a solid process development system. These may be combined, but it must all go through a suitable mechanism, a
recognised set of gateways and criteria, and you need the discipline. So, if you can’t get to a gateway because your
capability studies are inadequate or your record of potential failures isn’t completed, it’s having the confidence to
say, ‘Let’s stop and put it right,’ and then move on afterwards. It has
to be data- and analysis-driven.”
In a similar way, the building industry is adopting the approach of
building information management (BIM) to improve the reliability
of projects. This approach uses technology to better manage
information and to track asset data from start to finish. It is allowing
the alliances that are so often adopted to deliver projects to model
the product and process, in order to identify and resolve issues
before they arise. Mills, of Balfour Beatty, describes how important
this is as building designs develop. He says that a lot is known in
the industry about the reliability of various materials and building
methods but BIM really adds value when architects develop new
designs that have not been built before. It is within these complex
assemblies of different known components that an approach like
BIM provides the necessary capability to model different scenarios ahead of the final build.
McCabe at Nuvia comments that over-specification of designs as a way of achieving end-use reliability is being
challenged by customers that are seeking more value for money. In turn, this is challenging engineers and
manufacturers to achieve reliability through inherent design and manufacturing excellence, but in doing so, this
is creating a new assurance challenge. Williams makes the point that, in a number of markets in which Lloyd’s
Register operates, there has been a recent increase towards greater demands to meet product and service
standards and regulations. He has observed that some organisations are beginning to adopt modern methods
of reliability management but it is an area of risk management that is still developing in practice. He also noted
that, where quality leaders are entering the profession from other non-quality disciplines, there are some gaps in
knowledge that the profession needs to assist in closing.
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Putting a value on corporate social responsibility
An organisation is judged not only on its direct services and products, and financial performance. Increasingly,
organisations are being judged by their commitment and responsibility towards the community and the
environment in which they operate – that is their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Research shows that
quality management practices are positively and significantly related to an organisation’s CSR rating [4].
Aligning CSR with an organisation’s strategic goals in a global market means balancing the economic benefits
of CSR demanded by shareholders with the expectations of local stakeholders, if it is to have a positive impact.
Vodafone has long recognised that “financial results alone are not enough: the societies and communities within
which we operate want companies to focus on enhancing lives and livelihoods, not just enhancing returns to their
shareholders. Overlooking that expectation would risk undermining our prospects for long-term value creation,”
according to Vittorio Colao, chief executive, Vodafone Group in a 2013/14 sustainability report. Jessamy-Fuller
explains how her organisation’s ‘People Programme’ uses an annual survey to seek ideas for projects about work,
people and the environment, which in turn are used to feed into real changes in the organisation, with each
manager taking responsibility to share the findings with their local teams.
In the public sector CSR is delivered by ensuring services provide the best value for taxpayers’ money or the
‘public pound’. Coulthard describes how in Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Foundation Trust they work in
partnership with other public authorities to share buildings and maximise public estate, and how they support
employment of people with experience of receiving the services being provided. The values, philosophy and
culture of CSR will be driven by the context of individual organisations, whether in commercial or public sectors.
Quality leaders have a role to play in ensuring that the organisation’s governance, assurance, and improvement
processes are effectively harnessed to minimise risk and sustain its reputation for CSR – see Figure 3.
Figure 3
A quality framework for
corporate social responsibility
CONTEXT
Governance
and corporate
strategy
Leadership
within the quality
function
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Working with partners
Business, technologies and economies have developed in such a way that organisations in the 21st century
recognise the increasing need to establish mutually beneficial relationships with other organisations, often called
‘partners’. The philosophies behind the various total quality and excellence models support the establishment of
partnerships and lay down principles and guidelines for them [5]. Although partnership working has become a
fundamental part of day-to-day operations in many organisations, all too often the business results actually fail to
meet expectations. Recent research studies revealed that the failure rate of corporate alliances and partnerships
range between 50 and 70 per cent, and key problems often arise in some important areas, for example:
•
•
•
•
Expected operating efficiencies not being fully realised.
Adverse impacts on customer service and sometimes on company reputation.
Insufficient recognition of how informal relationships are critical in achieving success.
Increasing and often ‘invisible’ management overhead costs,
eating into profit margins.
As Rosabeth Kanter, professor of Business Administration at
Harvard Business School, points out: “Relationships between
companies begin, grow and develop – or fail – much like
relationships between people!” [6]
From independent research and practical experience, five key
dimensions which underpin successful partnering have emerged:
• Strategic alignment: how well the partners are/could be
aligned and how do/could they achieve this alignment at all
key levels of management?
• End-customer focus: to what extent do/could both parties
develop and deliver the desired standards of service and experience across the whole service chain?
• Decision-making and governance: how the partnership is/could be managed to best effect and efficiency.
• Communications and transparency: how well data and knowledge is/could be captured, shared and
disseminated in a way that builds value and not cost.
• Investment and improvement: the extent to which the partnership does/will jointly invest and improve the
partnership operations and outcome measures.
An example of one of the most common errors in the set-up and management of outsourcing relationships is a
failure on the part of both partners to fully identify and communicate the jointly-held desired ‘end-state’ for the
partnership, in words and pictures that inspire their respective teams. This description of the end-state should
define:
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• the vision for the partnership: what both parties want the outsourcing model to become
• the mission for the partnership: why it exists at all, the purpose of joining together and the role this
partnership plays in the local community
• the goals for the partnership: what key outcomes must be jointly delivered and how these outcomes will be
measured in terms that all workers will understand.
This has the benefit of:
• setting the context for assessment, review and improvement of the partnership
• ensuring that outcomes meet the strategic goals and customer needs
• achieving the buy-in essential to addressing the later stages of partnership improvement.
Here are some insights from the interviews with top quality professionals that illustrate the five key dimensions:
Strategic alignment
“We have a separate process which is called MAP, our mission
alignment programme. This was developed in America;
it’s where people who are not affiliated to the projects
meet with our customers and ask questions around what’s
important to them. We’ll then manage and measure these
areas progressively throughout the project to make sure that
they are focused on them until delivery and handover. This
allows us to bend and weave, and focus on those actions and
KPI’s that are really important to our customers.”
Ian Mills, Balfour Beatty
Ian Mills
End-customer focus
“One of the things that we found very successful was to get
some of the major customers in and give a talk. Let our people know what the customers actually do with
our products, then people start to buy in and I think that’s very important. We talk about the implications
of doing things right, the implications of doing things wrong, but I think nothing drives that home better than
proximity to the customer.
Nigel Croft, ISO TC176/SC2 for Quality Systems
“It’s really getting into the process that keeps everybody happy and we are finding that fine line. To that end,
visiting the customer, talking and above all listening to the customer, inviting the customer to the factory, and
involving them in all that we do including feedback we may want to consider for new product introduction,
helps to achieve excellence.”
Neil Anderson, Caterpillar Skinningrove
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Decision making and governance
In discussing decision making and governance, it is about: “Getting it right for the level of maturity in the
organisation.”
Jackie Jessamy-Fuller,Vodafone
Jane Jones, chair of London Excellence, points to the National Audit Office document, Delivering value
and accountability: How finance can help, which contains some valuable guidance on how costing and
cost management should be considered in the wider context of value management in a challenging and
uncertain world. The document focuses on how the finance function can help the organisation deliver
value with the ‘more for less’ challenge, within an increasingly complex public sector landscape. It sets out
five key factors:
1) The organisation understands the business model
2) Leadership demands, uses and rewards the right
management information
3) The finance function has the right structure and skills
4) There is one version of the truth on costs and values
5) There is the right balance of stability and flexibility in the
financial framework.
Use of information, flexibility of management information etc,
is seen as key so long as there is only one version of the truth
on costs and values.
Jane Jones, London Excellence
Communications and transparency
“It’s fundamentally about transparency. People are resourceful,
so we need to give them the right information, openly and
honestly and share with them, warts and all, about where we
believe we are good and where we believe we’re not so good. We need to foster relationships as equals
with our staff, our service users, our carers and our partners, so that we can all share and own quality
improvement and work on the journey together.”
Adele Coulthard, Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust
“In terms of suppliers, our first requirement is that they are certified to the highest third-party certification
within the industry. We also insist that suppliers follow the advanced product quality planning process and
all of its line items and gateways. Furthermore, we ensure that suppliers meet our own supplier QA system,
which is loosely based on the industry standard and covers a number of operating areas across the business
that include logistics, planning, delivery, quality, manufacturing and process capability. We also employ resident
engineers in pretty much all of our critical first-tier suppliers, supply technical assistants (STA) to both help
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them drive their APQP programmes and to monitor how those suppliers run their internal framework, such
as management reviews, policy deployment – all of the things that we do within our own business.”
Head of quality within the automotive industry
Joint investment and improvement
“We have what we call a consolidated supply review – and supply is talking about resource, so what we
have as a business is a forward load of contract work, prospects, forecasts, stock orders, which gives you a
resource view going forward over two years, what you’re going to need. What is apparent, when I’ve taken
the quality forward load, and when I’ve taken into account my current quality resource, is that sometimes
there’s a gap. So I form a view on what we’re doing about closing that gap.”
Gary Illingworth, Leonardo MW Electronic Warfare
Generating better reliability in partnership with
our customers
Extending warranty terms is proven to increase sales, but increasing
underlying shareholder value means improving product reliability. It’s
an important source of competitive advantage, but many firms seem
reticent to exploit fully its significant potential.
Reliability improvement programmes can increase value through
cost reduction, revenue growth, risk avoidance and improved
brand equity. But not all businesses have the same mindset. While
some may have field quality issues they want to address, some
may be content to maintain their current product reliability
position, while others may want to make reliability a core part of
their growth strategy.
Whatever the starting point, one thing is clear: with changes in customer expectations, technology and regulation,
positive action on reliability is required just to maintain market position.
While the specific strategy required depends on the company’s current position and future aspirations, the tools
and techniques to deliver it are well established. Businesses need to invest to build capability in these tools and
techniques so they can make positive changes and position themselves for the future:
• How you respond to field failure is crucial, both inside and outside of the organisation. At Leonardo MW
Electronic Warfare, Illingworth has invested in training for his team in how to lead teams when responding
to field failure. His team is called upon to lead ‘failure review boards’, where cross-functional teams are
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commissioned to get the facts, identify root causes and then develop plans for containment, remedial
and corrective action. Illingworth has identified the importance of influencing skills to such pressured
environments and sends his team on formal training to build their skills and confidence when in these roles.
This becomes especially important when dealing with customer representatives. For Illingworth and his
team, it is particularly important to work in partnership with the customer when identifying and resolving
root causes. Data on reliability when in use is not always readily available and yet can be an essential source
of perspective on a problem. At a major motor manufacturer, dealer and roadside assistance teams are
tapped for crucial data on the whole system’s performance (driver and vehicle).
• Assurance is a team game, but only if the whole team is prepared to ‘play’. To do so requires the whole
team to engage in building strong working relationships necessary for the assurance approach to function.
Shared goals, common understanding, sufficient capability, balanced incentives and agreed values are all
important if all parties are to accept accountability for their
respective roles in the process of delivering assurance. Mills
has noticed this at Balfour Beatty within the context of the
‘soft-landings’ approach to project management, used within
the building industry. He says: “I think that the challenge of
doing it [the soft-landings approach] is convincing the business
to do it everywhere, because the approach of getting people
to sit down and to take accountability for being part of a
successful project is really important. Without this, parties are
liable to take a disproportionate level of risk in any project
and that will then affect behaviour adversely.”
Building a culture of continuous assurance
through competence
For an organisation to be able to assure quality, it needs to select and assign people who are competent, on the
basis of applicable education, training, skills and experience, to those activities which impact on the conformity of
products and/or services. In construction and other project-based industries, where much of the work is actually
undertaken by subcontractors, this includes workers and supervisors across the supply chain.
To achieve this, the organisation needs to:
• determine the competency levels necessary for those doing work under its control that could affect the
performance or effectiveness of the business
• ensure that the people deployed are suitably competent, on the basis of appropriate education, training or
experience
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• when necessary, take action to provide the required competence and evaluate the effectiveness of the
actions taken
• retain relevant records in the form of documented information as evidence of competence.
In many sectors it may be beneficial to conduct joint training of supervisors and managers on processes or
projects to ensure that they are working within a consistent framework of values and expectations. Other actions
to secure the necessary levels of competency might include coaching, mentoring, staff redeployment, hiring or
contracting. The quality professional undoubtedly has a role to play here and this must not be left only in the
hands on an HR function.
Having people with the right capability is the foundation for a culture of ‘continuous assurance.’ Some important
aspects of developing this are:
• Start at the very top. “You need a Chief Executive who really
understands and has bought into quality and improvement.
They have to live and breathe quality improvement, have
it written through them like a stick of rock.” (Coulthard,
Director of Operations at the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS
Foundation Trust).
• Create a culture where you learn from your mistakes in a
non-accusatory, non-blame environment. Mills paraphrased a
great quote on culture: “Culture is what people do when they
leave the room!” Anderson believes: “You have to build it up;
you have to live it.” Croft points out: “Praise those who are
doing a good job, who are showing good results and the rest
of the people start shuffling in their chairs… start really feeling a little bit uncomfortable that they have not
done their bit and they are not achieving the same results. I think it is a question of identifying people who
are prepared to change, who are prepared to innovate.”
• Establish and develop the right behaviours:
• Firstly, this applies to the quality team. When recruiting for roles in quality, particularly in relation
to the assurance roles, Illingworth places huge store in attitudes and behaviours. He has discovered
that he can more easily prepare people for roles in ‘assurance’ if they have essential skills and the
right behaviours, but trying to change embedded behaviours, especially in highly qualified staff, is
a challenging task. He says: “You’re always asking and influencing, so the behavioural aspect of our
assurance guys is key.”
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• Secondly, this applies to the business as a whole. Some interviewees say that customers are
including statements about the way they want to see their suppliers managing their businesses in their
specifications. As we heard right at the beginning, McCabe has observed at Nuvia that, “the client is
telling us their perspective of what good quality looks like in terms of what they wish to buy. They’re
talking about behaviours, ie how we work, as much as the product.” A fully functioning, reliable product
is now expected as the norm and customers are looking at other ways to differentiate suppliers and
drive value through productive partnerships. Clearly, this presents a whole new dimension to the
assurance challenge. As a result, Nuvia has experienced more holistic assessments and audits.
• Finally, this applies to functional leads and process/project managers. Some of the interviewees
comment on or allude to the challenge of establishing an environment of positive accountability for
product and service reliability and the attendant assurance activities. Leaders of activities along the
value chain are still prone to offload the responsibilities and accountabilities to a quality team, rather
than accepting their roles for ‘quality at source’. McCabe uses Hoyle’s ‘Goal Management Questions’
[7] to challenge the thinking of these managers at Nuvia and prepare them for a more effective and
meaningful third-party audit or assessment. Over time, this approach becomes the norm to the extent
that managers instinctively ask themselves these five questions as part of their ongoing assurance activity.
As McCabe notes: “It’s a simple way to explain quality to managers at every level of the business.”
Illingworth outlines his biggest assurance challenge: “It’s about getting the right people into our specialism,”
and goes on to state that, in particular, he is struggling to get young talent into the profession. He is well
aware that the CQI and its Next Generation Network are addressing this, and that it is a long-term goal,
but it is crucial to achieving what is required in an organisation in the 21st century that is getting full value
from its quality professionals. He points out: “You’ve got to make our profession sexy, attractive, the career of
choice for people coming out of academia but we’re not there yet.”
Summary
The senior quality professional in any organisation must aid the creation and development of a vision for assurance
with the executive team, specifically that the assurance approach and activities need to be customer centric,
embrace the entire end-to-end delivery chain and be value adding. It is essential that it is not seen simply as ‘more
checking’ but is integrated fully with the existing or developing business/quality management system.
The assurance activities need to include the full range of inputs that a management team would use to build
confidence, encompass ‘business as usual’ reporting structures, information flows and meeting structures.
The approach needs to be expert-led yet include all the functions (HR, project management, finance etc).
Fundamentally, the executive team needs the quality professional to help it build a sound and reliable underlying
preventive operating model, rather than identify failure and non-conformance.
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The resulting assurance framework and approach should be based on established maturity and risk assessment
tools and incorporate best thinking from a number of established approaches and research. It needs to cover
systematically all aspects of process and business maturity and enable dissimilar processes to be compared. It is
impossible to assure a business unless the key accountabilities within it are clear – the ‘ground rules’ against which
the required competencies and culture can be developed. The key things to emphasise about the approach to
assurance is that it should be holistic, top down, bottom up, company-wide and cross-functional.
As the head of quality of one leading automotive manufacturer summarises: “When all of us walk through the
gates every day, one way or another our responsibility is to put a good vehicle out of the gate that the customer
wants to drive and doesn’t have any problems with. So, whether we have quality in our title or whether we have
accountant or engineer in our title, we are all focussed on putting a good product out of the door. It is about how
we as a group lay down our processes, so that they work for us. It has to be structured and it has to be cascaded
by a suitable management system, through agreed mechanisms and responsibilities, and there has to be recognition
from people outside of the quality department that they need to contribute to those processes and procedures,
both in terms of working to them and in terms of creating them.”
Bibliography
1. The CQI Competency Framework. The CQI, 2015. Found at quality.org/knowledge/cqi-competency-framework
2. Repositioning the Profession – Governance:The foundation for success. The CQI, 2016. Found at quality.org/
content/cqi-and-irca-members-area
3. Statistical Process Control – 6th ed. John Oakland, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007
4. Managerial Practices and Corporate Social Responsibility. Attig, N and Cleary, SJ, Journal of Business Ethics, 2015,
131(1): pp 121-136. doi:10.1007/s10551-014-2273-x
5. Total Quality Management and Operational Excellence:Text with Cases – 4th ed. John Oakland, Routledge, 2014
6. Collaborative Advantage: the Art of Alliances. Kanter, RM, Harvard Business Review, 1994, 72(4), pp 96-112
7. ISO 9000 Quality Systems Handbook – 5th ed. Hoyle D, Butterworth–Heinemann, 2006.
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