QOS: Activity 4 – Planning for Improvement

This is part of a series on Quality as an Organizational Strategy (QOS). Read the introduction or explore other activities: Activity 1 – Purpose, Activity 2 – System, Activity 3 – Information, Activity 5 – Managing Improvement.

Strategic Improvement Requires Planning

Every organization faces countless opportunities to improve. Without a systematic approach to planning, improvement efforts scatter across whatever seems urgent or appeals to individual leaders. Resources dilute across too many initiatives, progress stalls, and frustration builds.

Strategic improvement requires deliberate planning that connects improvement efforts to organizational purpose, focuses resources on what matters most, and builds capability over time.

Planning as a System

Effective planning doesn’t happen in an annual retreat alone. It’s an ongoing system (figure 1) that brings together inputs from across the organization, processes that information to identify priorities, and produces plans that guide both operations and improvement.

Figure 1. Planning as a system
(Source: Quality as an Organizational Strategy, 2024, p.244)

The inputs to planning include everything you’ve developed in the previous QOS activities:

• Your organizational purpose (mission, vision, tenets)
• Your system map showing key processes and their interdependencies
• Your vector of measures revealing system performance
• Information gathered from customers, employees, and other sources
• External factors affecting your ability to serve

Leaders review these inputs together, looking for themes and patterns. What’s working well? Where are we struggling? What changes in the environment require adaptation? Where do we see opportunities to better fulfill our purpose?

This analysis leads to strategic objectives—the priorities that will guide improvement work. Effective strategic objectives connect directly to the organization’s purpose and point toward specific improvements needed in the system.

From Objectives to Projects

The system map becomes crucial at this stage. Once you’ve identified strategic objectives, you can ask: Which processes in our system must improve to achieve these objectives?

This is where many planning efforts break down. Leaders set objectives but fail to connect them to the specific processes that need to change. The result: lofty goals with no clear method to achievement.

The system map makes this connection explicit. For each strategic objective, identify which mainstay, driver, or support processes must improve. This focuses attention on where work needs to happen.

Your vector of measures provides another critical check. If you improve the processes you’ve identified, will the relevant measures respond? Will you see the impact in your data? This prediction discipline helps ensure your improvement work actually addresses the objectives you’ve set.

The result is a prioritized list of improvement opportunities that clearly link to strategic objectives through specific processes. These opportunities become the basis for chartered improvement projects.

Figure 2 is a visual display depicting the total predicted impact of improving a process and the current condition for the process. The circle notes the process ideal for improvement efforts.

Figure 2. Scatter diagram of process condition and total strategic impact
(Source: Quality as an Organizational Strategy, 2024, p.268)

Planning to Operate and Planning to Improve

Your planning system must address two distinct but related needs:

Planning to operate focuses on predictable activities requiring proactive response. Capacity adjustments, seasonal volume changes, staff transitions, technology updates—these are foreseeable needs that shouldn’t become reactive scrambles. Planning to operate ensures these are executed smoothly without disrupting ongoing work.

Planning to improve focuses on changing the system to achieve better results. This requires understanding which processes need improvement, chartering projects, and and resourcing teams.

Resourcing and Discipline

The planning process should produce a portfolio of chartered improvement efforts, each clearly connected to strategic objectives. But here’s where discipline matters most: only launch as many projects as your current resources can support.

Many organizations overestimate their capacity. They charter ambitious portfolios, then watch projects be slow to progress due to insufficient resources, competing priorities, or lack of improvement expertise. Better to select a vital few projects, provide them adequate support, and complete them successfully than to launch many and finish none.

Be honest about your current capability and capacity. Build both over time by successfully completing projects, developing people’s skills, and creating routines that support improvement work. This incremental approach produces more progress than overly ambitious plans.

Integration Matters

Planning for improvement shouldn’t be separate from other planning processes. Strategic planning, business planning, budgeting—all must integrate with improvement planning. When these processes align, improvement becomes part of how the organization operates rather than something extra that competes for attention.

This integration ensures improvement projects receive necessary resources, align with business objectives, and connect to how the organization allocates investment. It transforms improvement from peripheral activity to core strategy.

Next: In Activity 5, we’ll explore how to manage improvement efforts to achieve results.

Sources:

Clifford M. Norman, Lloyd P. Provost, and David M. Williams. Quality as an Organizational Strategy: Building a System of Improvement. (Provident-Heierman Press, Austin, TX). 2024

Clifford M. Norman, Lloyd P. Provost, and David M. Williams. The QOS Field Guide: Guidance, examples, tools, methods, and exercises for using Quality as an Organizational Strategy to build a system of improvement. (Provident-Heierman Press, Austin, TX). 2025

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David M. Williams, Ph.D. works with leaders and improvement teams to learn and apply Improvement Science to achieve results and adopt quality as a strategy. He is coauthor of Quality as an Organizational Strategy and The QOS Field Guide.