Care for Quality
Taking Care of Quality Through Quality Assurance Training
Our quality assurance training is especially suited for the hourly worker but benefits anyone concerned with maintaining high quality standards. The workshop is designed around recognised principles of quality assurance and addresses the underlying psychological concepts and human factors that influence it. This approach guarantees participant engagement which translates into concrete improvements in quality performance when it comes to your projects and goals. In addition, as safety experts, we are aware of how quality impacts safety and bring this aspect of quality assurance to the forefront in our training course. Our quality improvement programme consists of 3 workshops that last 4 hours each.
KEY LEARNING / OUTCOMES
Situational awareness
- Understanding the importance of checklists in assuring quality
- Learning how situation awareness affects people's ability to "get it right first time"
Decision Making
- How legacy thinking can make people more efficient
- How our decision making style helps us avoid creating, accepting or passing on poor quality issues.
Quality Assurance
- How common biases affect our judgement
- How stress, fatigue and poor communication impact quality
Target Audience
The hourly worker and quality assurance personnel
Duration
Three workshops of four hours
Care For Quality Structure
| Day 1 | |
| What is a Defect? | Practical session: looking for a defect in a piece of equipment using the right checklists/tools. |
| Situation Awareness | High levels of situation awareness allow you to spot a defect earlier, which leads to good decisions. |
| Quality Blindness | How we can be easily distracted, which means we end up passing on, accepting or even creating poor quality. |
| Perception | We discuss how we enhance our perception. |
| Example | We look at examples of when NASA failed to get quality right and why. |
| Legacy Thinking | We look at what legacy you would like to leave behind in your job and how ensuring good quality work allows you to do that. |
| Decision Making | Analytical and intuitive decision making. When do we make our own decisions about quality and when do we refer to expertise? |
| Day 2 | |
| Quality Assurance | What is quality assurance? The gurus of quality and how quality assurance was born. How we compromise quality through poor habits. |
| Example | Another NASA example of compromised quality. Toyota – leading experts in quality and what they do, and where in the past they have made mistakes. |
| Situation Awareness | A look at how stress and fatigue can influence quality. How strong our biases are that prevent us from seeing quality issues |
| Teamwork Exercise | Teamwork exercise to highlight that you need to be a part of a team to achieve great quality. |
| Day 3 | |
| Continuous Improvement | We discuss Marginal Gains |
| Examples | Olympic cycling team and Team Sky |
| Power of Beliefs | We look at the difference between fixed mindsets and growth mindsets |
| Improvements | Review type improvements to achieve goals, eight ways to help focus attention, different forms of root cause analysis |
| Team Building Exercise | Showing how marginal gains can make an overall positive quality improvement |
Quality, cost and safety are all extremely important, as well as interrelated: if you get quality right, then you influence cost and, most importantly, safety. Unfortunately, people often pay more attention to safety and cost while shortchanging efforts to address quality. Many organisations see quality as the exclusive domain of the quality department. However, when we recognise the importance of assuring quality at each project stage and even in everyday tasks we create teams that excel in every area. Our quality assurance training “Care for Quality” addresses the skills necessary to achieve this type of all-around excellence. Experienced instructors lead sessions on engaging effectively with checklists, adopting appropriate tools to foster improvement and becoming aware of how our brains influence poor decisions made around quality. Workshop participants gain mastery over quality assurance, ensuring they have the skills to avoid generating or accepting poor quality.
DEKRA Organisational and Process Safety is a behavioural change and process safety consultancy. Working in collaboration with our clients, our approach is to influence the safety culture with the aim of 'making a difference for the better'. We deliver the skills, methods, and motivation to change leadership attitudes, behaviors and decision making among employees. Measurable, sustainable improvement of safety outcomes is our goal.