Beyond compliance: elevating quality systems to drive performance

This year’s World Quality Week theme – from compliance to performance – is vital. Performance is high on the UK government’s agenda. It makes sense that investing in digital technologies, skills and infrastructure are all likely to form part of the UK’s planned industrial strategy. But we also need a revolution to transform the quality of what we produce and, crucially, how efficiently and effectively we produce it. 

Success through performance    

Don’t get me wrong, compliance is vital to safety and trust. But complying is not performing. We must have quality systems that build performance. This is fundamental to growth, productivity and sustainability for the whole economy.  

The quality practitioners, quality teams and organisations that win the CQI’s International Quality Awards offer valuable insights. Their success demonstrates how aligning the quality effort to context and strategy – with a focus on improving the performance of the organisation – leads to greater value for its customers and society at large.   

In these cases, the ‘hardware’ of quality systems and tools is balanced with a real focus on developing the ‘software’ of organisational-wide culture and capability. That, after all, is where quality and non-quality are created. 

Successful quality practitioners are all about developing the knowledge and skills required to be relevant to performance and impactful in new domains such digital and sustainable quality. 

Vince Desmond, CEO, CQI

Moving beyond compliance

A quality certificate at the reception should give confidence in compliance and the organisation's ability to meet customer expectations. However, it does not guarantee the best customer value on the market or that the business is sustainably competitive.  

As society becomes more informed and concerned about issues like productivity, competitiveness, public sector efficiency, skills, product and service failure, and so on, the need for change is clear. Now is the time to shift the quality conversation beyond compliance to driving performance.