Choosing your approach to quality

If you are interested in using or developing a quality system, your first step should be to consider exactly what you hope to get out of the initiative, and then to identify which areas of your organisation you want to quality assess.

You may have particular priorities such as the management of your volunteers or your human resources processes, or you may want to take a holistic approach initially, to help you identify the areas of your organisation which most need improvement.

Three approaches to quality assurance

Once you have a list of topics or areas, you then need to decide on an approach to quality improvement. NCVO suggests three possibilities:

Devolved approach

This involves giving people across your organisation responsibility for maintaining high quality in their area of work. Individuals would be expected to check and compare their practices against any identified standards. In small organisations, many of the core topics such as strategic planning, recruitment and external relationships can fall to the chief executive or to individual trustees, who may need support to assess current practice and suggest improvements.

Centralised approach

This involves establishing a working group to take forward quality improvement. Depending on the size of your organisation, the working group may consist of, say, a few managers, frontline staff and board members and is typically led by a named individual. The group considers all areas in turn, talking to those who have a particular stake in each area. Improvements are identified by the working group and reported to the board, although sometimes working groups have decision-making and reviewing powers. This approach introduces a stronger element of challenge which can be useful where some topic areas have been neglected or where the culture of improvement needs strengthening.

External approach

This involves getting an external agency to assess your practices, to rate them, and to suggest alternatives. This external validation of the way your organisation is run, perhaps with a kitemark for the successful, can be useful with funders or potential partners. However, it focuses more attention on assessing and recognising your existing standards, than on improving them. You may still need a working group to facilitate the process, especially the collection of data for the assessor.

Which approach for you?

The process you adopt will need to reflect your organisation's existing culture and attitude to improvement, as well as the state of your existing practices. It will also be dependent on the time you have available and the financial costs involved, for example, purchasing an off-the-shelf system or buying in advice or external assessment and/or accreditation.Use our quality selector to compare popular systems.

Both the centralised and external approach require investment of considerable energy over a sustained period.

Some would argue that the devolved approach is the ideal that you should aim for, because it is sustainable and involves a self-generating culture in which people across the organisation enjoy taking responsibility for continuous improvement, albeit with the support and encouragement of their managers and the board. 

However, in order to get to the devolved approach to quality improvement, you may need to use the centralised or external approach at least once, and work hard to ensure that both the specific learning and the broader attitude of improvement sticks within the organisation. Read more about embedding a culture of improvement.

Useful tips

• Be sensitive to workloads if you are expecting a large investment of time from staff or, in smaller organisations, from individual board members.
• Decide who will be involved at senior management and board level, and how you will monitor and review the process.
• Communicate across the organisation. A quality improvement system will only work if people within the organisation are committed, which means raising awareness of what you want to achieve and feeding back on progress and outcomes.
• Check whether any of your funders or commissioners of services require or expect you to use particular quality systems. Read more about funders' approaches to quality.