Meeting Stakeholder and Quality Needs - Coursework Example

Meeting Stakeholder and Quality Needs Explain Who Organizational Stakeholders along with their expectation Organizational Stakeholder can be defined as a person, group or organization that has an interest on the organization or the company. There are 2 types of organizational stakeholders namely direct and intermediary. Direct stakeholders are directly related to the organization such as trustees, founders and beneficiaries. For an social work manager, internal stakeholders will usually be social workers, managers, councilors and finance staff members. External stakeholders will usually be service users, provider agencies, government agencies and CQC inspector. (Ashley & Amir, 2010) Intermediary stakeholders are not directly related to the organization but may have an interest in the organization. E.g. - government. The list of stakeholders of any company are- Owners and stockholders Banks, creditors, partners and suppliers Management, employees, work partners, professional association Government(local, state and national) General Public The stakeholders have many expectations and it can be categorized as satisfied, exceeded, created or eliminated. The success of the organization depends if the expectations are met or not met. The expectations of the stakeholders can be overlapping and there are various operational and management goals are designed to satisfy the different stakeholder expectations. The expectations of the customers will be to get the better quality service and low costs and the expectations of the management and the company is to improve the return on investment, increase profit margins and control operational expenses. (Kumar, 1998) Methods used to meet stakeholder expectation and methods of communicating these requirements to the team members: There are different ways of achieving the stakeholder expectations. Defining standards for input, process and outcomes are very essential for meeting the requirements. The standards laid by the organization must be realistic, reliable, valid, clear and easily measurable. Firstly, the organization needs to analyze the stakeholders and understand their interest and impact in the organization. The organization then needs to develop a strategy that provides guidance to communicate and interact with the key stakeholders. The strategy developed need to be implemented across the organization to achieve the desired results. The stakeholder strategy should incorporate the following elements- Different ways of meeting the stakeholders’ expectation Ways of creating ownerships Methods of communicating with the stakeholders Ways of eliminating issues and negative impact on stakeholders Identifying and addressing the stakeholders issues and resolving Involving the key stakeholders in major decision making    These results have to be periodically checked and monitored to access the results. This helps the organization to evaluate where they stand and what are the additional strategies that need to be adapted in order to improve the results with the organizations stakeholder. (Lauri, 2009) Process involved in updating information on stakeholder requirements The requirements vary with each type of stakeholder and the requirements can thus be classified into – Business or functional requirement Operational or management requirement Database requirement Systems and IT requirements GUI requirements It is very essential for the organization to organize regular meetings with the key stakeholders and involve them in every meeting. Review process should be initiated and approval of all the stakeholders’ requirements should be made. The management should start working on the construction phase. There must be QA team to analyze the requirement documents and the defects should be identified and handed to the development team. Defect logs should be in place to track all the defects. All the defects should be rectified before the final user acceptance testing and rolling over to production. (Sandeep, n.d)     What is Quality to the organization? Quality is an ongoing process of accessing, anticipating and fulfilling needs for sustaining relationships. It is also defined as the degree of meeting or exceeding expectations of its consumers. The quality procedure is laid out by the management and formalized in written documents. The quality policies will lay the different rules and regulations in the organization. TQM (total quality management) is the most popular tool used in many organizations. TQM helps organizations to identity and analyze the quantitative and qualitative data that are relevant to the business. There are number of TQM tools that various forms such as brainstorming, focus groups, checklist, pie charts, graphs and other analytical tools. Pie charts: they are used to compare the different data of different period and this will usually relate to one particular issue such as budgets, performance of the team, productivity, sales. Histograms: these illustrate different data points which help in taking decisions and these are extremely effective for comparing statistical survey or comparing the questionnaire results. Pareto Analysis: Pareto analysis is done to prioritize problems and helps in solving the issues with the process or the organization. This chart can be prepared for particular time frame and can be scheduled over selected period of time to track the changes and performance. Force Field analysis: This tool helps the organization to identify the driving and the restraining force in a particular process and what the ways of identifying and eradicating the restraining force. This also helps the organization to process at a high level of efficiency and increase productivity. Ishikawa or Fishbone Diagram: This tool helps in identifying the different levels of cause and effect and the relationship between the two. Focus groups: This is a very useful tool in the advertising or marketing organization. Focus groups consists of a group of people from the general public to discuss the product, give their opinions, improvement area, issues and this feedback helps the organization to improve Brainstorming session: This team helps in using the creative things and constructive and healthy arguments in order to identify the issues and take necessary actions. (Cara, 2004) Benchmarking: Benchmarking is also another tool that helps in comparing the inputs, process and the outputs within a single institution over time. Different business processes can also be compared to the industry bests. This process helps in implementing new and improved business practices. Performance Indicator: this tool is a measure of performance and it is also widely known as Key Performance Indicator (KPI) it is usually used in organizations to help them in defining and evaluating the process. KPI differ according to industry and the process for each Organization. This helps in evaluating the progress of the organization and all the long term goals. Auditing: Auditing refers to evaluation made by a person, organization, process or a product. Quality audits usually helps in evaluating the effectiveness of the quality management. Quality audit should not only highlight the non conformance and corrective actions made but also all the good practices made by the process. Improving quality and continual improvement All business organization is looking for improving quality, reducing costs, improve customer satisfaction and improve the profit margins. Employees play a very vital role in the organization. Employee participation is an ongoing activity and is a part of all the workplace practice and it is also now recognized as an organizational culture in many of the organizations. There are different ways of achieving continual improvement of the process. Campaigns for employee suggestions and continual improvement help the organization in many ways. The campaign would help in capturing ideas, improvement plans, suggestions, areas of improvement and this can also create high level of motivation and enthusiasm among the employees. The campaigns can provide ideas on many areas- Cost reduction Continual improvement Safety of the employees Customer satisfaction Improving motivation New product  and services (Gregory, n.d) Engaging the employees in decision making also improve the performance and increases their motivation. When employees are consulted for any change, it increases the productivity and improves quality of the output. There are other strategies that help the employee participation in continual improvement and quality are- Regular stack meetings with the employees to know their pain areas, issues, challenges and appreciations Regular performance reviews with the employees and discuss their goals and their performance. Identify the gaps and provide training and development of the employees. Key channel of communications such as newsletter to increase the employee participation. This also provides an opportunity to canvass for ideas and obtain feedback on the feasibility. Research has indicated that teams without management or supervisor have greater motivation that team handled by a supervisor. (The High Performance Toolkit, n.d) Continual Improvement: Continuous improvement is defined as improving customer satisfaction through improved process, refining the steps and excluding unnecessary activities in the process. Continual improvement should improve efficiency, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. Improvement is not about having different tools and techniques. Improvement can also mean to improve the team and train people. There are 2 types of improvement and continuous improvement is an ongoing change and continual improvement is an incremental change. Continual improvements are very essential for the process as it is directed towards improvement and control. Improvements are required for companies to stay in the business as it helps in creating change. Continual improvement programme can be started in any business and in any process and the objective of the programme should be identifying better ways of processing. There are essential 10 steps in undertaking continual improvement- Determine the current performance of the process Establishing details and identifying issues that can be improved Defining the improvement objective of the organization Organizing the quality resources to work on the improvement area Research and development to analyze the cause of the current failure in the performance Producing improvement plans and testing on the process and access the variation Overcome any issues identified during testing Implementing the new improvement process Placing controls to have different levels of performance. It is the responsibility of all the employees and management to participate in the continual improvement process but most of the continual improvement programmes are done by specific quality teams who diagnose problems and implement changes. Usually the team is led by the management and directing them and this helps in providing success to the organization. The organization can incorporate any continual improvement tool to execute the above steps- Ishikawa fishbone diagram to analyze the cause and effect Failure mode effect analysis to have proper preventive actions Pareto charts to help the team in identifying the influences which have an impact on the process failure Charting helps the team to identify if necessary improvements are achieved Continual improvement is not only a set of rules and techniques. The success of the organization depends upon the commitment of the management team and the employees. The employees must be encouraged to take more process initiatives and improvements. Encouragement can be in the form of providing awards to the employees for identifying improvement areas, notice boards to display the list of employees who has provided the most number of ideas and improvements.  (Continual Improvement, n.d )                                     Literary References: Ashley Braganza and Amir M. Sharif (2010) The knowledge Management kaleidoscope: Keeping Stakeholders and their expectations in focus, European and Mediterranean conference on Information Systems 2010, Abu Dhabi Cara Payne (2004) Total Quality Management Tools (TQM) [online] available from http://www.slais.ubc.ca/people/students/resumes/C_Payne/media_pdf/TQMTools.pdf (accessed 19th May 2010) Continual Improvement [online] available from Chartered Quality Institute available from http://www.thecqi.org/knowledge-hub/Resources/Factsheets/Continual-improvement/ (accessed 18th May 2010 ) Gregory P. Smith (n.d) Bright Ideas Employee Suggestion Campaign [online] available from http://www.chartcourse.com/bright-ideas-employee-suggestion-program.html (accessed 19th May 2010) Kumar Kamalesh (1998) Meeting the expectations of the key stakeholders: stakeholder Management in the health care industry[online] available from http://www.allbusiness.com/business-planning/business-structures-corporations/690261-1.html ( accessed 19th May 2010) Lauri E. Elliot (2009) Stakeholder Strategy tool, [online] available from http://www.lauri-elliott.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/stakeholder-strategy-tool.pdf ( accessed 19th may 2010) Sandeep Mehta, Requirements Management and Stakeholder, [online] available from http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_requirements_management_and_stakeholders.php (accessed 19th May 2010) The High Performance Toolkit [online] available from http://www.business.vic.gov.au/busvicwr/_assets/main/lib60037/08_hpt3-1employeeparticipationindecision.pdf (accessed 18th May 2010) Read More