609 Leading Quality Management

Unit Overview

609 Leading Quality Management is a unit within CMI Level 7 that focuses on improving quality management approaches within the organisation. Leaders have to contribute towards meeting the goals and objectives. This involves effectively setting up quality standards that the organisations must meet to ensure that they contribute towards the success. The leaders must also understand mechanisms that they can set up to create continuous improvement within their areas of responsibility.

There are principles that should be established to ensure that the leaders are able to effectively handle the issue of quality and continuous improvement. This includes the principles used to effectively set up approaches to evaluate the performance in relation to quality and setting up approaches that the leaders can use to effectively handle the process of continuous improvement. Leaders must understand the quality control methods, quality assurance systems, and tools and techniques to use within their areas of responsibility.

609 Leading Quality Management is a unit that is designed to support the contribution of the leaders in creating quality control and continuous improvement. It helps the leaders to effectively develop an effective environment that focuses on quality management. By having an understanding of the principles of quality management, leaders must be able to set quality control approaches and tools within the workplace. The unit contributes towards building the ability of a leader to get the relevant information and skills that aims at addressing the learning needs of the new or aspiring leaders hence ensuring they are able to achieve the desired goals and objectives within their areas of responsibility by improving quality. The unit is taught in 2 hours of guided learning and contributes 6 credit values towards the completion of the CMI Level 5 module

Suitability of the Unit

609 Leading Quality Management is a unit that is suitable for leaders within the workplace. Leaders have a responsibility to ensure that they facilitate quality management and continuous improvement by setting quality checks within the workplace. It is important, therefore, to ensure that these leaders are tasked with the information and skills that they require to implement the desired levels of quality control within the workplace. This involves being able to ensure that the quality standards are understood by the stakeholders within the workplace. As such, the unit is suited to the leaders within the workplace to ensure that they are able to successfully fulfill their rules and responsibilities.

The unit is designed for the learning needs of the senior managers within the workplace. The unit contributes towards improving the ability of these leaders to establish effective practices that are aligned to ensuring their departments, units, or lines. The unit is, however also applicable to other leaders with the responsibility of facilitating the accomplishment of tasks in other areas of the organisation. Middle and junior managers contribute towards improving the performance within their organisations. It helps to improve the ability of the employees and external consultants to make their contributions within the workplace and prepare the employees for leadership roles and responsibilities.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should be able to:

• Assess and evaluate the organisational approaches designed to facilitate quality management in relation to different perspectives and theoretical models

• Appraise the impact of multidimensional issues and quality management within their areas of responsibility

• Identify the impact of quality management that can be developed to ensure that the organisation is able to achieve its strategic objectives

• Create a proposal that can lead to quality management at the operational and strategic levels of the organisation

• Understand the impact of individuals and teams and how they can be supported to facilitate quality and continuous improvement in their practice focuses and activities.

Key Learning Areas

This unit contributes to understanding the procedures and approaches to improving performance in relation to the organisational goals and objectives. Some of the main areas covered within the unit include:

Quality Management

This area of learning introduces the learner to the methods and approaches of quality management. The learners are guided to understand the principles such as total quality management and the theories of quality management that could be implemented within the workplace. Additionally, the learners are introduced to different tools of quality management as well as understanding the impacts of organisational values, practices, and policies in the process.

Some of the main tools that the learner must understand include quality control charts, process capability analysis, and root cause analysis. Learners are also guided to understand different theoretical models that contribute to improving the handling of the process of quality management and quality improvement within their areas of responsibility.

Leading Change

This area of learning focuses on the strategies and approaches that have been embedded within the organisational practices and cultures that involve being able to improve the performance of individuals and practices in general. The learners are guided to understand the benefits of continuous improvement and the theoretical models that can be used to successfully boost performance in terms of quality and quantity within the workplace. It also helps the learners to understand the principles of evaluating quality performance, including the balanced scorecard, feedback, and financial performance.

This also evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods of evaluating the performance of the leaders. This understanding helps the leaders to be able to align the identified tools and techniques to the actual specific context and needs of the organisation. This area helps to understand the approaches that strategic leaders can put in place to ensure that they create continuous improvement for the employees within the workplace, which is aligned with the quality management needs of the organisation.

Evaluation

Upon completion of the unit, the learners are required to complete an assessment. The evaluation includes a written assessment which is used to test both the theoretical and practical knowledge within the area of learning. The assessment can be used together with supervised practice and simulated exercises to optimise the evaluation of the ability to learn to implement the learned principles in actual organisational settings.