Goodbye to the early adopters

Watch out in the near future for the one hundredth TQS certification.

Looking at the list of certificated organisations suggests that someone will become the one hundredth successful organisation fairly soon. (If you count employer organisations as well, we might already have the one hundredth achievement.)

What a milepost like this will indicate is that the TQS is well and truly in the mainstream of activities.

The organisations that like to be the first to achieve an award, whenever a new one is first promoted, have got their badges. The organisations which were just about ready to be certificated, when the TQS was launched, have gained their certification.

The first in the region, the first in the sector, the first to gain full certification in …. have all achieved their successes.

The photographs with happy people holding their certificates and plaques are on the websites and life is moving on.

This all means that the organisations coming through now are often taking a bit longer to get ready for certification. They probably have had further to travel in terms of their development than the trail blazers. They have more things to do, more systems to put in place, more processes to define, implement and refine than some of the organisations that achieved certification early in the life of the standard.

Today, many organisations looking for TQS certification really do need a structure for their activities and for their TQS development journey, if they are going to gain the prize of certification.

So, from now on, the way forward for these organisations is a systematic approach to gaining certification. The best way to do this is to produce a week-by-week development plan and a checklist of systems and processes that need to be in place and operational before the application is sent off.

Now that the period of innovation and novelty has passed, as far as the TQS is concerned, it’s time for sensible development, down-to-earth planning and plenty of hard work.

Goodbye to the early adopters, indeed!