Step 10: Is there a quality team?

Employees should be fully engaged with a quality system. Quality teams or quality circles underpin excellent quality systems.

Involving employees in system development encourages a quality culture and asking for employee feedback can lead to improvement initiatives. How do you communicate your quality system to employees?

Step 11: What do we need to change?

Having undertaken the first 10 steps, you will have identified a number of gaps in your system. Now it is time to decide:

1. What needs to change?
2. How will this change happen?
3. The time period for the change?
4. Who will manage the change?
5. What resources are required?

The outcome for Step 11 is essentially a plan of the activities that must be completed to ensure that the overall quality vision is successfully achieved.

Step 12: What resources do we need to deliver the change?

A full understanding of resource requirement ensures that the quality system will succeed. Many organisations underestimate this step and then wonder why a new quality initiative failed. Resources may include:

1. Financial
2. Time
3. People (skill, competency, knowledge)
4. Technology
5. Processes and workflows
6. External resources (consultants, quality programmes, accreditation).