Suppose you are working in an organization and are supposed to improve the quality of the section you are working in.

Suppose you are working in an organization and are supposed to improve the quality of the section you are working in. Stepwise formulate a plan for improving the quality of your section.


(a) Fad of the Month
If organisation is proactive in quality but has reactive perceptions about the future they will introduce one fad after another to practice he latest quality tools but with little effectiveness.
(b) Frustration
A reactive approach to quality when combined with the proactive approach to the future leads to high frustration. The organisation may have great plans for quality but they don't find an opportunity to implement the same as they are involved in fire-fighting or managing one crisis after another.
(c) Extinct
A combination of reactive quality as well as future may endanger the very survival of that organisation which may become extinct.
(d) High Energy High Success
An organisation can become dynamic and thrill its customers (also capture the market share) if it combines a proactive approach to quality with proactive thinking about future. This combination leads to a kind of a fission relation in which when two highly potent masses are placed together a lot of organisational power is unleashed to generate high energy which will lead the organisation to achieve levels of success.
Role of Quality in strategic business planning process:-
In order to integrate quality with the strategic planning process a systematic and sequential procedure has to be adopted.
The following nine broad steps comprise the 'strategic planning process'.
1. Listen to the customer's needs.
2. Plan how you will meet the customers' needs.
3. Be aware of your values and align your organisation to serve the customers.
4. Be aware of the forces that will influence you.
5. Develop specific quality objectives.
6. Consider various scenarios.
7. Plan to close the gaps.
8. Take action to achieve the objectives.
9. Revaluate and renew efforts.
1. Listen to the customer's needs.
The basis of strategic planning is the identification of customers and their wants and needs. An organisation must seek its customers' requirements, expectations and assess future trends before developing a strategic plan. Customer requirements include prices customers are likely to pay in addition to reliability and performance. Frequent listening to the voice of the customer shall provide the organisation much useful customer feedback. Viewpoint is to treat customers as stakeholders in the organisation. The quality policy should be relevant to the expectations and needs of its customers.
2. Plan how you will meet the customers' needs.
Next, the organisation must determine its positioning with regards to its customers. Various alternatives such as whether the organisation should give up, maintain or expand market position in some or the other product categories which should be considered. An organisation in order to become successful should concentrate and consolidate its position in the areas of excellence to be able to provide high quality products/services to its customers in the most profitable manner. This can be achieved by formulating the mission statement of the organisation which will guide it in delighting the customers and clients. The mission statement with emphasis on quality provides legitimacy to the quality in the organisation. Employees are encouraged to believe that quality improvement is core part of their jobs. The focus on quality in its mission statement will help an organisation to come closer to meeting and exceeding the customer expectations.
3. Be Aware of Your Values and Align Your Orgnisation to Serne the Customers
The next step is to develop the internal vision of the organisation after the organisation's positioning with its customers have been clarified by developing a mission statement with strong emphasis on quality. Sometimes the organisational restructuring has to be attempted to achieve the desired outcome. Once the mission statement is prepated/developed the organisation need to invest some more time in reflecting on their vision and values before developing a strategic plan. The strategic plan provides the path for achieving the vision and mission of the organisation. The value statement provides guidelines for work ethic and the behaviour of employees. The values define what people in the organisaition believe. For a successful strategic plan the following core values are essential: 1. Drive out fear. 2 Participative leadership.

3 Use of data and management science techniques.
4 Continuous improvement
5 Commitment to learning.
The vision statement (or a set of value statements) describes where the organisation wants to be in terms of "overall performance and competitive leadership". This is the core of the quality-centered strategic planning. 4. Be Aware of the Forces that will Influence You
Strategic planners must devise an appropriate mechanism through which they can scan both the present and future trends of external environment that will exert an influence on the organisation. A review of an organisation's history helps in discerning future trends. The success of strategic planning process depends on the ability to think of the future as an environment that is shaped and formed by plans and actions undertaken by organisations in proactive manner. 'The Force Field Analysis', a technique developed by Kurt Lewin,a social scientist is useful in the scanning process.This technique visually displays the various positive and negative forces that impact a situation.


All these three are vital to achieving the mission and vision The key strategic objectives are also called the actionable key business drivers which are shown in figure.
6. Consider Various Scenarios
In this step various scenarios are considered which can be envisioned on the basis of three
possibilties:
(i) Events going well for the organisation
(ii) Events going very badly
(iii) Events going in a manner that is most likely to happen.
Using multiple scenarios offers many advantages. Based on the mindsets of the strategic planners and thinkers either the optimistic, pessimistice or middle-of-the-road scenarios can be developed. It enables an organisation to prepare itself to be flexible in adapting to any of the above scenarios. It will also help in identifying gaps that exist between where the organisation presently stands and where it needs to be.
7. Plan to Close the Gaps
The strategic planning team identifies and establishes goals which will assure high quality in their endeavours. They should perform gap analysis to find the difference between current situation and the goals. Quality improvement is not possible without a specific plan to close the gaps. Assessing the relative importance and relative difficulty or each gap enables strategic planners to direct their energy in closing the gaps. This may also be termed as process improvement. Organisation should embrace quality as an essential ingredient in their vision, mission and objectives. They should also increasingly use specific statistical quality tools to achieve their quality objectives. Figure highlights some such tools.






It is necessary to use the right tools to help the organisation close the quality gaps. The strategic planners must take some steps to close the gap between the vision and current reality.
8. Take Actions to Achieve the Objectives
At this stage the time is ripe to get down to the implementation of action plans and also to develop a suitable mechanism for tracking the performance results. Two issues are o paramount importance:
• Should the organisation focus on measuring the implementation of the action plan?
• Should it focus on the objective in the strategic plan?
The use of an external standard for benchmarking performance can be a useful technique. Such standards can help in deciding about the imlementation of a strategic plan in any organisation.
One of the criteria that can be used is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is the biggest proof that the customer's inputs are well integrated with various organisational processes and activites. If customers are not satisfied then it is clear that the organisation is not on the right path in its pursuit of strategic quality objectives. This consciousness leads management to take corrective actions to improve the situation. The management should develop an action plan for every gap identified in the strategic plans. It defines what actions will be taken by whom and when. These action plans should be developed with a commitment for implementation by line managers.

9. Reevaluate and Renew Efforts
The external environment is continuously changing, causing an impact on the organisation. A strategic plan once developed is not static as it has to come up to the expectations of the dynamic realities. The
Strategic planers should reassess and reenergize the system, before the energy and enthusiasm wanes in the earlier established strategic plan. Otherwise the strategic plans will become obsolete
and forgotten.
In order to keep the organisation focused on the path of quality improvement, it is very important to think of renewing strategic plans in the light of prevailing environmental conditions.
There may be some resistance to the change by line managers as they have to reframe their action plans. The need and importance of the process of continuous quality improvement
should be explained to them in order to manage resistance to this change. Juran
observed,"talking about quality does not provide results. Results occur when people get
organised to improve their work processes." The strategic planning process connects all of the
components of the quality programme to achieve high levels of quality and to satisfy their
customers which will enable them to survive and prosper in future.