Quality management (QM) appears in many forms in learning and development. When facilitating a course or conference session on quality for L&D professionals, I like to ask for a show of hands as I read out different options for how their organizations might handle quality management. I’ve also conducted an online poll, which focused on the reviews, not entire quality management systems. I consider the poll unofficial due to the small sample size (139 votes) and the unverified answers. However, it still provides insight into what organizations are doing, and the results are consistent with my experience and the answers I receive when I facilitate.

Of the L&D professionals who answered my poll, nearly half (48 percent) said they conducted peer reviews, meaning their fellow designers checked their work. At 30 percent, the second-highest option was an internal dedicated team for quality management (in which “dedicated” was defined as a team that only works on quality issues for an L&D team). Next was self-review at 19 percent. Finally, only 2 percent had an external dedicated team.