The iTrain Quality Manual
From iTrain’s Quality Policy and the associated Quality Manual, flow the plans, policies, procedures and records that iTrain require in order to consistently achieve the above aims. The Quality Manual is structured into sections to ensure that Quality thinking is applied to all aspects of our business:
- Customers
- Business Planning
- People
- Business Operations
- Assets and Information,
- Design
- Improvement
It is worth noting that much of our success in developing our quality management system across a geographically dispersed organisation has been due the use of our own Stratus eLearning tool to introduce and explain new processes and procedures and in raising awareness of our Quality aims.
Approach to Contract and Project Management and Service Delivery
The delivery methodology used by iTrain is Agile and Prince2, in conjunction with formal policies and procedures created and maintained within our Quality Management System. All iTrain Project Managers are certified to Prince2 Practitioner level.
Train is fully committed to understanding and then meeting or exceeding customer needs. This starts with the management team, led by the Board of Directors, who own the iTrain Quality Policy, from which the following extract is taken:
“It is iTrain’s Policy to be seen as a trusted partner by its customers by working with them to understand and consistently meet or exceed their needs and expectations” iTrain has developed and maintains two core processes within its Quality Management System: Pre-Sales and Delivery, the first of which is related to capturing and understanding customer’s needs. The Delivery process defines roles and responsibilities in assuring the effective delivery of services. A key element of this is the iTrain Project Office (IPO), a team comprising representatives from all departments that manages customers’ needs throughout the project lifecycle.
iTrain employs a 4-stage solution delivery process, comprising: Define, Design, Develop and Deploy. Close customer contact is regarded as essential at every stage of this process and within the formal structures of Agile and Prince2, formal review and customer sign off of key deliverables is mandated by every project plan. All solutions are managed throughout the delivery lifecycle by a project manager who at the start of every project is required to develop and subsequently maintain a Project Initiation Document (PID).
The PID is a living document throughout solution delivery and includes defining the customer’s project team and Project Board, with whom the Project Manager liaises throughout and especially in the verification and validation of key product deliverables. The PID also includes the definition of all project governance measures to assure quality, including customer communications, formal meeting structures and responsibilities for sign-off of milestones and deliverables.
Customer Satisfaction Assessment
Customer involvement is regarded as critical to the effective application of continuous improvement within iTrain. Key elements of this include joint ownership of the Risks and Issues log, which is regularly reviewed and updated as part of the routine customer meetings chaired by the Project Manager. The Log then feeds through into the post-project review as part of the formal Lessons Learned process.
As part of the project closure process, our procedure mandates that customer satisfaction assessment is carried out and the outputs and assessed by the Senior Management team, chaired by the Managing Director each quarter. iTrain fully appreciates that “customer” does not mean one person or one group and that true continuous improvement relies on capturing views and suggestions from as many involved parties as possible. To reflect this, iTrain maintains two types of satisfaction assessment for Learning & Development: one to capture and assess feedback from those directly receiving the service, and the other aimed at managers responsible for acquiring the service. These surveys are fully adaptable to meet customer needs as required.
Business Continuity
iTrain has extensive experience of project-based work and has full appreciation of the need to effectively manage peaks and troughs of demand. Formal policies have been established to manage planned and unplanned absence.
Work scheduling is kept under constant review and procedures are maintained to escalate issues through to the iTrain Planning Office (IPO), a group comprising senior managers from each iTrain department that meets monthly to match demand to resources.
With regard to longer-term, structural planning, iTrain maintains policies and procedures designed to meet a key tenet of our Quality Policy: to ensure “suitable and sufficient resources”
In particular, two areas of activity support this objective: Business Continuity Planning, managed according to policy and procedure contained within the Business Planning section of our QMS; and succession planning, which is held within the People section, and supported by our Performance and Development review processes.
Business Continuity Planning considers all risks affecting the continuity of service provision. Each manager of customer-facing operations is required to review his/her risk assessment at planned intervals and to reassess all risks and the associated plans to mitigate or manage those risks. The outputs of this process are plans and activities to manage those risks, and improvement projects that are incorporated into our annual Strategic Framework.
The Performance and Development review process includes identifying employees’ possible career paths and developing plans to prepare them for those moves. The outputs from this feed into the bi-annual succession planning meetings, chaired by the Managing Director, which are used to identify any gaps in resource and plans to close those gaps.
iTrain Governance and Reporting
A key element of iTrain’s Agile and Prince2 approach is to establish and maintain appropriate levels and methods of communication, both formal and informal. Typically this would include weekly Highlight Reports associated with meetings between project teams, chaired by the iTrain Project Manager to an agenda agreed between both parties. In addition, more formal Project Boards are typically held to coincide with key milestones’ sign-off.
Project governance and control is provided through the use of Agile tools and methods, including but not limited to:
- Formal identification of project deliverables
- Auditable Quality Assurance of all project deliverables
- The development and maintenance of a Project Initiation Document (PID)
- Full risk assessment and formal management of change control
- Formal and informal communications, including regular project team meetings and Project Boards
- Development and maintenance of Microsoft Project-based project plans, showing project milestones, resource utilisation etc.
- Single-point of contact for all issues and updates
- On-site management of iTrain resources
- Regular Highlights Reports and maintenance of Risks and Issues Logs
Change Control and Change Management
By their nature, projects are susceptible to change during their lifetime and iTrain fully appreciates that the key to success in this regard is not the avoidance of change but its proper management in a controlled and timely way.
iTrain has established and maintains a formal change control process within its Quality Management System that is designed to ensure that the needs for flexibility and timely decisions are not prejudiced by the assurance of good governance.
Complaint Management
As part of its registration to ISO 9001:2008, iTrain has developed and maintains a formal customer complaint procedure.
Customer complaints are regarded as opportunities for iTrain to identify and rectify process deficiencies and employees are encouraged to view them as such. This is captured in the following extract from the formal procedure:
“It is important to recognise that as well as representing a possible threat to business, a customer complaint is also an opportunity to demonstrate our responsiveness and commitment to that customer as well as to correct any problems with our management system. Thus it is important that customer complaints are captured and managed. There may be occasions on which a customer hasn’t actually complained but something has gone wrong that required unusual effort to avoid impacting the customer. These instances should also be captured by this process, with the person raising the issue acting as the customer advocate.”
All complaints are captured on a Customer Complaint form, key elements of which are:
- All complaints have an identified owner and resolution/review dates specified
- As well as resolving issues to the satisfaction of the customer, complaint owners are required to establish root cause(s) and to state the actions taken to prevent recurrence.
When appropriate, 6-sigma methods are used to establish root cause and to then develop and implement process improvement(s). This includes the use of formal Management By Fact (MBF) project methodology as well as “Work-Out” facilitated workshops.