Quality standards should support organisations is identifying what good practice can look like and to provide a measurement for self assessment. They allow the organisation to take a step back and reflect on what they do and how they do it. As to benefits to the client, if the organisations purposefully collects feedback about their services and more importantly use it and do something with it - then clients can benefit. There is indeed often an assumption that system and procedure alone will do the trick. There is no shortage of client feedback, collected, collated and presented to senior management, but the link between "lessons learned" and subsequent action to improve services is often tenuous.

Quality processes exist so that there is consistency in standards of delivery for all clients and lessons learned from the quality assurance process contribute to the improvement of all services. To exaggerate the point, a guidance interview is not a friendly chit chat session which could divert onto topics such as the weather, what was on telly last night or the shops! Quality assurance ensures that the guidance interview process is delivered to a standard that has been agreed by the company and this standard is based on guidelines produced usually as a result of agreement between a professional body and an inspection service.

1) Questions really: my understanding of quality standards is limited

2) standards more about processes than outcomes

3) Possible answers to some of these questions...

4) Doubts as to whether quality will inevitably follow systems

5) Quality processes helping practitioners to focus

6) Interest in sharing ideas about IA

7) how IA findings could be used

8) Quality standards are not about impact analysis