CMI 519 Assignment Example

Quality is often defined as excellence, capacity, grade, worth, or meeting customer expectations. While the definition of quality is easy to find in a dictionary, it is much more difficult to develop and maintain.

CMI 519 Managing Quality and Continuous Improvement explores the challenge of developing quality within organisations. It focuses on embedding continuous improvement into daily work practices. Upon completing this unit, learners will understand the scope and purpose of quality management, the approaches, tools, and techniques for managing quality, and how to measure its success.

Fenchurch Facilities Management Limited delivers cleaning, security, catering support and reactive maintenance under contract to corporate offices, two NHS trusts and a university estate, employing 1,900 people across 34 client sites. Most staff work on client premises rather than Fenchurch’s own, and the service is produced and consumed simultaneously in front of the customer. The author is Head of Quality and Compliance. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.

Learning Outcome 1: Understand the scope and purpose of quality management within organisations

AC 1.1 Evaluate the scope and purpose of quality management within organisations

Why service quality is a different problem. Manufactured quality can be inspected before the customer sees it. A cleaned ward cannot. Services are produced and consumed at the same moment, they vary with the person delivering them, and they cannot be stockpiled or reworked. Evaluating what follows, quality management in a service business must operate through the people delivering it rather than through inspection of output, because by the time output exists the customer has already experienced it.

Definitions and their consequences. Crosby’s conformance to requirements is measurable and translates into specifications and service levels. Juran’s fitness for purpose introduces whether the requirement was right in the first place. Evaluating both against Fenchurch’s position, a washroom cleaned to the contracted frequency conforms; a washroom the building’s occupants consider unpleasant is not fit for purpose, and Fenchurch has repeatedly satisfied the first while failing the second.

The service quality dimensions. The widely used service quality model identifies reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy and responsiveness as the dimensions on which users judge a service, and holds that satisfaction arises from the gap between expectation and perception rather than from the objective standard achieved. Evaluating this for Fenchurch, reliability dominates: users forgive a slow response more readily than an unpredictable one, and consistency is worth more than peak performance.

The scope. Quality management extends across bid and mobilisation, where the specification and staffing model are set and most of the eventual quality outcome is determined; recruitment and vetting, since the person is the service; training and supervision; service delivery; the helpdesk and reactive response; supply chain, where subcontracted specialist work carries Fenchurch’s name; and contract review.

The purposes. Meeting contracted service levels and avoiding financial deduction. Retaining contracts at renewal, which is where quality converts into commercial outcome in this sector. Meeting regulatory obligations, which on healthcare sites include infection prevention standards. Protecting reputation in a market where clients take references. And controlling cost, since rework in a service business means doing the job twice with labour that is the dominant expense.