8607-501 Managing Improvement

Unit Overview

Continuous improvement is the main goal of any organisation. It ensures that the company can be able to adapt to the changing business environment and maximise its performance within the organisation. The leaders should play the central role in facilitating this continuous improvement within the organisation, ensuring that it can effectively meet the customers’ requirements, needs and expectations. 8607-501 Managing Improvement is a unit within the ILM Level 5 qualification in leadership and management that helps the leaders to build the necessary skills in improving the ability to influence the performance of the organisation by facilitating and managing continuous improvements within the organisation across an extended period.

The leaders must be able to improve their ability to identify quality needs and customer requirements and facilitate the attainment of these goals within their specific areas of responsibility, and this unit makes critical contributions towards these goals and objectives of leadership in any organisation.8607-501 Managing Improvement is a unit that is aimed at improving the understanding and ability to manage quality within the organisation hence making it able for leaders to plan improvements to meet or exceed customer requirements.

This is achieved through effective practice among the elders in the organisation, which ensures they can coordinate different activities and practices hence facilitating the desired levels of success. Middle-level managers are central to the process of implementing operational strategies and plans that seek to achieve these customer requirements and exceed market expectations. The unit is taught in 8 hours of guided learning and contributes 3 credit values towards the completion of the module.

Suitability of the Unit

Different stakeholders within the organisation have different responsibilities and duties that hefty have to plan. These duties involve overseeing practices within specific areas of responsibility and operation. For leaders, the duties revolve around coordinating individuals and mobilising resources to ensure specific projects and activities within the organisation are effectively handled. In this area of practice, the individuals need to ensure that they create a process that facilitates success in managing and implementing improvements which is critical for any organisation by ensuring that it can adapt to its obligations of meeting the customer requirements.

8607-501 Managing Improvement is a unit that helps the individuals seeking to build knowledge and skill towards managing improvement effectively to access the theoretical models and guidelines to building the desired competence levels.The unit is designed to meet the learning needs of middle managers. Potential or practising middle managers need to prepare adequately to coordinate teams within the organisation that are responsible for delivering services to the customers.

In this process, the leaders need to have the necessary information that helps to build these skills. 8607-501 Managing Improvement provides training on such areas that improve leadership practice and performance. The unit is also applicable to lower-level leers such as junior managers and team leaders, and it helps them to apply critical principles of handling improvement within their area of responsibility while at the same time building the ability of the executive management to oversee improvement across the overall organisation. Employers and team members can also pursue the unit as a means of building professional and personal competencies and preparing them for leadership roles.

Learning Outcomes

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

• assess the effectiveness of their organisation in managing quality to meet and exceed customer requirements and expectations

• identify personal abilities to manage quality to meet or exceed customer requirements and expectations

• develop an effective improvement plan that is designed to meet and exceed customer requirements and expectations if possible

• implement the improvement plan that has been developed to meet or exceed customer requirements

• evaluate the performance of the implemented strategies for managing improvement within the organisation

Key Learning Areas

8607-501 Managing Improvement is a unit aimed at building the understanding and appreciation of effectively handling quality to improve the performance of the organisation. It helps to develop an understanding of the role that the managers have in facilitating success in the handling of various areas of improvement within the organisation. Some of the key areas of learning within the unit include:

Managing Quality

This area of learning focuses on critical concepts of quality and its relation to customer requirements and needs. It helps the learners to understand the aspects such as quality assurance, quality control and quality auditing, which are important in linking quality to customers. The area further helps in understanding quality systems such as BSI, ISO, liP and Total quality management. They are guided in developing tools for maintaining quality and understanding the total costs of quality within the organisation.

This information is critical in ensuring they appreciate their contribution in facilitating success within the organisation by effectively managing the issues of quality. The leaders are also guided to understand factors affecting the satisfaction of customers. This includes understanding customer requirements and creating benchmarks for the standards of products and services offered to the customers within the market. This area builds an understanding of the areas that need improvement to ensure the organisation is able to satisfactorily meet or exceed customer requirements and expectations.

Improvement Plan

This area of learning helps to develop an understanding of other critical scope of improvement plans that identify and prioritise areas of improvement. The learner is taught approaches that can be sued to develop a criterion for success through setting targets for improvement that are aimed at meeting the customer needs and requirements. The unit also guides the learner through different steps of improvement plans which are the developing, implementation, monitoring and adjustment phases of the plan.

Wrap Up

Upon completion of learning in 8607-501 Managing Improvement, the learners are put through t eh evaluation process. This involves monitoring the practical application of concepts and the mastery of theoretical information within the units. The learners are required to complete a written assessment which is used as a tool of evaluation together with other approaches such as supervised practice and simulated exercises.