OMAN QUALITY CONFERENCE

To survive and thrive. Managing quality effectively can enhance your organisation’s brand and reputation, protect it against risks, increase its efficiency, boost its profits and position it to keep on growing. Quality is not just a box to be ticked or something you pay lip service to. Failures resulting from poor governance, ineffective assurance and resistance to change can, and do, have dire consequences for businesses, individuals and society as a whole. Quality isn’t just an issue for commercial enterprises. Every organisation has stakeholders of one kind or another whose needs they must strive to meet, which is what effective quality management is ultimately about. Quality management is about making organisations perform for their stakeholders – from improving products levels, services, standard systems and processes, to making sure that the whole organisation is fit and effective with a clean work culture. By stakeholders, we mean anyone who has an interest in the success of what your organisation does. Customers will be the most important group of stakeholders for the majority of businesses, but investors, employees, suppliers and members of our wider society are stakeholders too. Delivering an acceptable level of quality in your organization means knowing who your stakeholders are, understanding what their needs are and meeting those needs (or even better, exceeding expectations), both now and in the future. Everyone from the CEO to the intern is responsible for the quality of what they do. Different people will have responsibility or influence over different things that affect the quality of an organisation’s outputs, such as specifying requirements, meeting those requirements or determining the quality of something.