STRATEGIC QUALITY PLANNING AND DEPLOYMENT:

By Joseph A. De Feo 

Strategic quality planning (SQP) is a systematic approach to defining long-term business goals, including goals to improve quality and the means (i.e., the plans) to achieve them. Many organizations have created a vision “to be the best,” toward a goal of outperforming competitors. Many of these organizations fall short in achieving this vision. Most do not align, or have difficulty aligning, their performance excellence initiatives like lean and Six Sigma to the annual business plan. This leads to lack of resources to complete projects, which in turn makes them hard to justify.

To achieve a vision it is necessary to align the annual goals to your major change initiatives or quality programs and integrate them into the strategic plan. This will ensure the new focus becomes part of the plan and sustainable.

Japanese quality leaders refer to this process as hoshin kanri or “policy deployment. Ho, shin, kan, and ri are actually four words that loosely translate to “focus, direction, alignment, and reason.”

Focus by creating goals that provide direction and alignment of the resources needed from the organization to meet those goals and the reasons for selection them. The reasons force management to understand why it is selecting these goals.

The potential benefits of strategic quality planning and deployment include:

• Clarification of goals
• Achievability of goals
• Scheduled reduction of chronic wastes and improved quality of products and services
• Better or new focus on customers

Strategic quality planning is the systematic process by which an organization defines its long-term goals with respect to quality and customers, and integrates them into a cohesive business plan. It enables an organization to execute organizational breakthroughs to achieve a competitive advantage and quality leadership.

The approach to providing organization wide financial goals has evolved into a more robust strategic plan, incorporating these goals into a hierarchy that includes the voice of the customer. A structured methodology must include a provision of rewards, universal participation, a common language, and training.

Launching a strategic plan

Creating a strategic plan requires that leaders be personally involved, eliminating the atmosphere of blame, and making decisions on the best available data. The strategic deployment process requires incorporating the customer focus. The elements needed are generally alike for all organizations. The ones in most widespread use tend to be:

• Mission
• Vision
• Values
• Policy

The mission is the reason for the organization’s existence. The vision is the desired future state of the organization. Values are what the organization stands for, and they tie into strategies, which are the means to achieve the vision. Policies represent a guide to managerial action, guiding day-to-day decision-making. And finally, the deployment plan is what turns vision into action.

Developing the plan

Strategic deployment begins with a customer-focused vision, which should define the benefits that can be expected. Good vision statements should be compelling and shared throughout the organization. But vision statements are only words—a reminder of what the organization is pursuing, which must be carried out through actions. When forming a vision, it’s important not to focus exclusively on shareholders, to properly explain the vision to everyone involved, and not to create a vision too easy or difficult to achieve.

A mission is often confused with a vision, but a mission statement should clarify an organization’s purpose. Together, a vision and mission provide an agreed-upon direction, which can be used as a basis for decision-making.

To convert the vision into an achievable plan, it must be broken into key strategies. Responsibility for them must be distributed to key executives. To determine what the strategies should be, five areas must be assessed:

• Customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Costs related to poor quality of products or processes
• Organization’s culture
• Business processes
• Competitive benchmarking

Each of these areas can form the basis for a balanced business scorecard. The key strategies can be modified to reflect long-term goals. An organization must set specific strategic goals that must be achieved for the broad strategy to be a success. Seven areas must be addressed to ensure that the proper goals are established:

• Product performance
• Competitive performance
• Business improvement
• Cost of poor quality
• Performance of business processes
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty and retention

Goals that affect product salability and revenue generation should be based primarily on meeting or exceeding marketplace quality. A widely used basis for setting goals has been historical performance.

Corporate values reflect an organization’s culture. Some organizations create value statements to further define themselves. Values are what an organization stands for, and must be supported with actions from management lest their publication create cynicism.

Policy declarations are a necessity during a period of major change. Most declare the intention to meet the needs of customers, and include language relative to competitiveness in quality. Some include specific reference to internal customers, or indicate that the improvement should extend to all phases of the business. Enforcement of new policies is a problem due to the relative newness of documented quality policies. Sometimes, an audit process is mandated to ensure the policy is carried out.

A fundamental step in establishing any strategic plan is the participation of upper management. The executives are responsible for ensuring all business units have a similar council at the subordinate levels of the organization. If a council is not in place, the organization should create one.

Once the strategic goals have been agreed upon, they must be subdivided and communicated to lower levels. Those who are assigned responsibility must determine the needed resources and communicate this to higher levels. The deployment process starts by identifying the needs of the organization.

Measuring progress

There are several reasons why an organized approach to measuring performance is necessary:

• Performance measures indicate the degree of accomplishment of objectives
• Performance measures are needed to monitor the improvement process
• Performance measures are required for periodic reviews by management

Once goals have been broken down into sub-goals, key measures need to be established. The best measures of the strategic planning process are simple, quantitative, and graphic. As goals are set and deployed, the means to achieve them must be analyzed to ensure they satisfy the objective they support. Once the system is in place, it must be reviewed periodically to ensure that goals are being met.

A formal, efficient review process will increase the probability of reaching the goals. The review process looks at gaps between what has been achieved and the target. Frequent measurements of progress displayed in graphic form help identify the gaps in need of attention. Success in closing those gaps depends on a formal feedback loop with clear responsibility and authority for acting on those differences.

Pursuing too many objectives at the same time will dilute the results. Trying to plan without adequate data can create an unachievable plan. If leaders delegate too much, there will be a lack of direction. The biggest disruption caused by strategic planning is created by imposing a structured approach on those who prefer not to have it. Resistance will be evident at the outset. Therefore, the most important prerequisite is the creation of an environment conducive to change.

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Self-Discipline and Consistent Quality are Inseparable Twins.

Self-Discipline  and Consistent Quality are Inseparable Twins.

As a quality consultant, I often hear these words:

•  “You see our business is very different, will ISO 9001 work for us?”
•  “Will Six Sigma work in our country?”
•  “Lean management might work well for Japanese firms, but will these  tools work for us?”

My answer is “Yes, if the processes are performed right, the results are surely going to be right”. So, nature of the product or nature of the business or country in which we conduct the business is not a critical issue. The focus needs to be on performing the processes correctly.

Lets consider a simple example. I have to reach office daily at 8.30 am. I know that to reach at 8.30 am, without stressful driving, I must leave my house at 7.45 am. Then, doing my process right would mean that I must wake up at 6.45 am so that I can leave my house at 7.45 am. If I want to spend 30 minutes on reading the newspaper before leaving for office, then I must wake up at 6.15 am. And, if I have to wake up early I must sleep early. (If I sleep late, I get up late, I leave my house late and there is every chance that I will reach my office late).

Another example would be of a student who is a top-performer in school. It is generally seen that such a student continues to perform well in higher studies, irrespective of whether he pursues a career in engineering or management or accountancy. Why is it so? This is because he has developed certain practices (or way of doing things) which ensure that he continues to achieve good performance till the end of is studies.

ISO 9001 or Six Sigma or Lean Management are all methodologies that help us to improve processes and standardize the ‘way of doing things’. Once we standardize a process then if we keep repeating it in the same manner, we are should get the same (consistent) results again and again. But why does this not always happen this way? Why do mistakes still occur? Does the fault lie with the ISO 9001 system or with Six Sigma or with the tools of Lean Management?

Not really! All these systems / methodologies work on building preventions in the processes and there is a definite logic in the way they work. Then where does the problem lie? Repeated studies show that the problem does not lie in finding solutions to preventing problems, nor is it really difficult to find ways to improve processes. The problem lies in sustaining the improvement.

In other words establishing a new system or improving a process is not the challenge. The real challenge lies in sustaining the improved system / process. For this reason we bring in Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and audits. But still, we observe non-compliance during the audits. Why does this happen?

In most cases where a set of procedures has been established, it is seen that mistakes occur mainly because “someone overlooked a step in the procedure”. Even the “best system or ideal process” could end up in mistakes if people performing the process do not adhere to the SOPs. We all understand that it is unsafe to talk on the mobile phone while driving. We also know that many car accidents do occur due to the driver speaking on the mobile phone, yet we overlook the procedure (and maybe even the law)!

If we have to sustain the performance of improved / standardized processes, what is needed most is “self-discipline”. The self-discipline that helps us to overcome the urge to adopt a short-cut in our work and the self-discipline to stick to doing things as defined in the SOP.

It is a proven fact that out of a thousand principles for success, the one quality that helps an individual to succeed is the habit of self-discipline. The same is true for organizations. Organizations run and sustain on the basis of self-discipline.

Often the cultural or political climate around us discourages us from being self-disciplined. People tend to think “when everyone else is indisciplined, why should I follow discipline?” “Everyone throws litter around, so why shouldn't I?” But, if everyone in an organization or in a country starts thinking this way where will we reach? And what is the use of standardizing processes / systems if we do not possess the self-discipline to follow them?

Toyota has been a rare example of an automobile company that made profit consistently for 50 years!! Then what has gone wrong with Toyota now? Why did they have to announce a large number of recalls?

In the words of their CEO Mr. Akio Toyoda, “Toyota's priority has traditionally been the following: First; Safety, Second; Quality, and Third; Volume. These priorities became confused, and we were not able to stop, think, and make improvements as much as we were able to before…….. We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organization, and we should sincerely be mindful of that. I regret that this has resulted in the safety issues described in the recalls we face today”.

Toyoda may express regret but the question is where did Toyota go wrong as an organization? They were very small when they started. They strictly followed the “14 Toyota Principles” for 50 years and went on to be known as the world’s best car company. But in the quest for fast results their managers and dealer network seem to have ignored some of the time-tested principles like ‘long-term philosophy’, ‘stopping to fix problems’, and ‘do not let problems remain hidden”.  The price Toyota had to pay for this ‘lack of self-discipline’ in following their established principles is anybody’s guess.

At times, I have seen people working in large reputed organizations operating under beliefs like “I am a knowledge worker, all these rules / SOPs are not meant for people like me” or  “I am a senior person, these rules / SOPs are meant for the juniors”. Also there are instances, when a senior manager suggests that “we bend the rule, just in this case”. What these persons overlook is that juniors usually consider the seniors and the knowledge workers as “role models” and they very soon copy what they learn from the role models.

For example, our office / factory procedure requires that my bag is checked while entering or leaving the premises. Then I may be the CEO or the Managing Director or the Security Officer, I must stop and get my bag checked. This kind of example-setting (and respect for procedures) demonstrated by the seniors goes a long way in conveying the message to everyone else in the organization. 

It would therefore be evident that if our organization desires to deliver consistent performance on an on-going basis, the managers must create a culture for strict adherence to procedures and a strong sense of self-discipline. If Toyota could fail after 50 years of consistent performance, this could happen to any one of us!

The Japanese have referred to self-discipline as the “Fifth S” in the 5-S habits of good housekeeping. But when it comes to ensuring consistency in quality, we can say that self-discipline is the “First S” and it applies to each and every member of the organization. If we wish to achieve consistent / sustained performance over a long period of time, the foremost requirement is to create a culture of self-discipline throughout the organization.

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