A quality plan is your team’s playbook for meeting expectations and improving service. It’s a written document that defines requirements and the processes that your team will use to meet or exceed them.
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Quality is essential for cleaning and facilities teams. That’s why best-in-class teams create and follow through on quality plans. Plans create a shared understanding of the work you’re trying to achieve and a method for reaching those goals. Without a plan, everyone on your team is just working without preparation, which leads to inconsistent results at best.
A quality plan is a document that outlines your team’s quality goals and process. It includes steps for measuring quality, comparing quality against goals, and closing gaps between expectation and reality.
The quality plan details what your team is trying to do, how they’re going to do it, and how they’ll know if they’re meeting their goals.
A good plan is highly specific. It should include staffing and equipment requirements, training, schedules, and more.
Industry best practices, including those from APPA and ISSA, include creating and following a quality plan. That’s because a quality plan helps your whole team work together to improve service.
ISSA CIMS certification, which is for organizations, not individuals, requires a written quality plan. You must communicate the plan to everyone involved, including the customer.
APPA guidance embeds the quality plan within the Deming Cycle (Plan–Do–Check–Act).
Key components of the quality control plan include:
Quality assurance is part of a quality plan. It compares actual quality levels to quality standards. It’s how teams know whether they’re meeting expectations and where they can improve.
Quality assurance for cleaning teams is most often a visual inspection with line items. Other quality assurance methods may include customer surveys; surface testing, such as ATP measurements; and analysis of complaints, tickets, work orders, and feedback.
Looking for software to implement your quality plan?
Team leadership is responsible for creating the quality plan and ensuring that everyone in the organization has the information, knowledge, and tools they need to follow through.
Everyone on the team should have some responsibility for carrying out the plan. Leadership needs to define those responsibilities and communicate why they’re important.
OrangeQC helps organizations run every step of the quality management process, starting with the quality plan. Going digital with a tool like OrangeQC makes the plan and your quality assurance tools available to everyone who needs them.
The Deming Cycle is a framework for thinking about improvement. It breaks the process down into four repeatable steps:
Plan: Identify standards and gather related documents.
Do: Put the plan into action.
Check: Measure how well your team followed the plan and if it achieved the desired results.
Act: Make changes based on findings from the Check phase, such as adjusting staffing, training, equipment, etc.
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