Impact of Covid 19 on Quality Management Implementation

The results show that 89% of you told us that your organisation’ had changed their working practices to adapt to the current situation.

You told us that your key challenges were:

• Remote working – The majority of our members are making fundamental changes to how they work. For auditors, remote auditing has moved, in the space of a matter of days, from being the exception to the norm and many of you are seeking some guidance on how to do this effectively.
• Best practice – You want to know how others are overcoming the current challenges, and  the opportunity to learn from each other is important to you
• Certification and regulation – you want to stay compliant and you need the latest information and guidance to help you do that
• Developing your people – Your teams are changing how they work, under pressure and in the most difficult of circumstances. You said you would welcome help with developing your teams to help keep them engaged and positive during this time.
• The value of quality – As organisations focus on business continuity and change at pace, members are worried that quality management will be overlooked or sidelined. You want help in demonstrating that good quality management practice is more vital now than ever.

What we are doing to help you

• We are producing content and guidance on how to conduct effective remote audits
• Quality World will be produced bi-monthly to ensure we are providing you with the very best content during this time
• We are collating examples of where members have had success in addressing challenges, and we are developing these into case studies and resources. These will give you ideas and help you to demonstrate the value of quality professionals at this time
• We are monitoring certification, accreditation and regulatory bodies for changes to their requirements so that we can share the most up-to-date news with our members
• We are working with our Approved Training Partners to enable them to deliver CQI and IRCA certified training online
• We are talking to our Associate Partners to provide guidance on team change management
• We are developing a platform to allow members to interact with each other in forums and groups to help you to share best practice and learning.

In addition to the above, we would like to remind members that they have exclusive access to our mentoring platform – now is a great time to share your experience or to seek advice and support.

What you can do to help us

We are particularly interested to hear from members that have experienced success with:

• Remote audit – First, second or third  party
• Best practice – If you have a success story about how your organisation has adapted to the current situation, supported by good quality management practice, including audit, we’d love to hear about it.
• New products – Has your organisation changed its products or began producing new products to support the current shortages, eg, started manufacturing medical devices? Has this involved rapidly establishing new or altered relationships with other businesses?

Attribute to original publisher/ publishing organization: The CQI|IRCA, https://www.quality.org/article/covid-19-and-quality-management-impact-survey-analysis