Quality Without the Complexity – An Interview with Hikmat Adamu, Founder of HiQMA Consultancy
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
Hikmat is a quality management consultant with over 14 years of experience across pharmaceutical manufacturing, life sciences, and engineering. Having built her career within some of the most highly regulated and complex organisations in her field, she developed a deep understanding of what truly effective quality management looks like when it is working at its best.
It was that experience that led her to found HiQMA Consultancy. Working alongside SMEs, Hikmat noticed a consistent gap. Business owners knew they needed quality support, and many already held ISO certification, but the foundational understanding and ongoing guidance that make a quality system truly function were simply out of reach. Too small to sustain in-house quality departments and underserved by an industry that had not been built with them in mind, these businesses were being left behind.
HiQMA exists to change that. Hikmat brings the rigour and insight of enterprise-level quality experience and translates it into practical, proportionate support that works for smaller businesses at every stage of their growth. Her approach is built on the belief that SMEs do not need a scaled-down version of what large organisations do. They need the right foundations, tailored to where they are, and built to serve where they are going.
Based in Warrington, England, and working with manufacturers and businesses across the North West of the UK, Hikmat is on a mission to make quality accessible, understandable, and genuinely useful for the businesses that need it most.
Hikmat Adamu, Quality Assurance Consultant
What are the most common misconceptions about quality management that you help organisations overcome?
The biggest one I come across is that ISO certification is the goal. I hear it all the time from business owners, and I completely understand why, because a certificate is tangible, you can put it on your website, include it in a tender, and win contracts with it. But here is the problem. If certification is the only driver, what you tend to get is a system built to pass an audit rather than a system built to actually run your business better. What I would love to hear instead is "we need more structure and clarity in how we operate, and we want to build something that actually works for us." That is the starting point for something genuinely useful. The certificate, if and when it comes, should be the recognition of a functioning system, not the reason you built one.
The second misconception sits right alongside it, and that is the idea that quality management is just paperwork. It used to mean filing cabinets. Now it tends to mean an extensive Google Drive full of SOPs and policy documents that nobody actually reads. That is not a quality system. That is a storage problem. A quality management system that works day to day looks very different. The right procedure is in front of the right person at the right time. People know their role within the system, whether that is executing a procedure, updating it, or sitting on the review team. They are not guessing, and they do not feel like the system is there to restrict them. They understand that it is there to create consistency, and they own their part in it. That shift from "quality is something that happens to us" to "quality is something we all play a part in" is where the real value lives.
How has your extensive experience across diverse industries shaped the way you view quality as a tool for sustainable growth?
Spending years working within large, highly regulated organisations like those in pharmaceutical manufacturing teaches you something that you cannot learn from a textbook. When the stakes are high and the products are critical, quality is not optional and it is not passive. Everyone in the organisation, regardless of their role, understands the purpose of the quality function, even if they do not understand every detail of how it works. That culture of awareness and understanding is what makes quality effective at that level.
What struck me when I began working with SMEs was that the same need exists, just in a different form. Smaller businesses do not need multiple quality departments or extensive compliance infrastructure. But they do need their people to understand why they do what they do, how it connects to the bigger picture, and what their role is in maintaining it. Without that understanding, even the best-designed system becomes a box-ticking exercise.
What my experience across industries has shown me is that the fundamentals of quality are completely transferable. The principles do not belong to pharma or engineering or manufacturing. They belong to any organisation that wants to operate consistently and grow sustainably. What changes is how those principles are adapted, simplified, and owned by the people inside each business. That ownership is everything. It is what separates a quality system that lives on a Google Drive from one that actually runs the business.
What role does quality play in risk reduction and decision-making clarity for organisations, especially in complex environments?
Without a quality system in place, most SME owners are making decisions in the dark. They know something is wrong; they can feel it in the stress levels, the rework, the customer complaints, but they cannot pinpoint exactly where the problem is coming from. Money is haemorrhaging out of the business through inefficient processes and nobody can trace it back to its source.
What I typically see when I work with a business that has no quality foundation is a cycle of firefighting. The same issues keep coming back because there is no effective corrective action process to actually close them out and move on. There is limited data to support good business decisions, and little to no visibility of the risks sitting inside the organisation. If something goes wrong, and it will, there is no mitigation plan ready because nobody has ever formally identified that the risk existed in the first place.
Then there is the human cost, which does not get talked about enough. Teams in these environments are frustrated. They feel the repetitiveness of the same problems day after day, but they do not have the understanding or the authority to make meaningful changes.
A good quality system changes all of that. It gives leadership the data to make clear decisions, the structure to resolve issues properly the first time, and the visibility to get ahead of risk before it becomes a crisis. It also gives people at every level a defined role in making things better, and that matters more than most business owners realise.
How do you tailor your approach to ensure that quality practices align with the specific needs and constraints of SMEs?
The first thing I do is ask what does good looks like for you at the end of this? Not what ISO 9001 says good looks like, and not what worked for the last business I worked with. What does it look like for you, in your business, with your team and your constraints?
From there, I always start with education. I need to understand how familiar they are with what they actually need, and they need to understand where we are starting from, where we are heading, and how we are going to get there together. That shared understanding is not a nice-to-have; it is the foundation on which everything else is built. If a business owner does not understand why they are doing something, they will not sustain it once I am no longer in the room.
My client is always in the driving seat. I sit alongside them, I suggest the directions, and we adjust the map to suit them as we go.
The way I think about my role is this. I am not the person who gets in the car, drives you to a destination, and expects you to feel confident when you arrive. That is not how lasting change works. Instead, my client is always in the driving seat. I sit alongside them, I suggest the directions, and we adjust the map to suit them as we go. We might take a different route than I would have originally planned, but we end up somewhere they understand, they own, and that genuinely serves their business.
That is what makes quality stick in an SME. Not a framework imposed from the outside, but a system built from the inside out, shaped around the real people who have to live with it every day.
What strategies do you use to help SMEs simplify quality management without overcomplicating systems?
The first thing I want to know is what has triggered them to reach out. What happened, or what kept happening, that made them realise something needed to change? That trigger is almost always the most important place to start, because it tells you where the real pain is sitting.
Sometimes they can pinpoint it immediately. A lost contract, a recurring customer complaint, a new member of staff who exposed just how much knowledge was sitting in one person's head. But sometimes they know something is wrong and they cannot quite name it. When that is the case, I start with a Reality Check Assessment, a structured diagnostic that gives us both clarity on where the business actually is, what is working, what is not, and where the gaps are.
From there, we work on what is causing the most pain first. I am not interested in building an elaborate system from day one. I want to give them an early win, something that makes them feel the difference quickly, and builds their confidence that this is actually manageable.
What comes next depends entirely on them. Some businesses need a focused short engagement to address one specific area. Others are ready to build something more comprehensive. But in both cases, the starting point is always the same. Clarity first, then action. Quality management does not have to be complicated. It just has to be right for the business it is serving.
If anything in this interview resonated with you, whether you are an SME owner who recognised your business in these answers, or a leader who knows something needs to change but is not sure where to start, the best next step is a simple one.
Visit www.hiqmaconsultancy.com to take the free Reality Check Assessment and get immediate clarity on where your business actually stands. You can also book a call directly from the website to have a conversation about what the right support looks like for you.
If you would like to stay connected and follow along with more plain-speaking quality insight, you are welcome to connect with Hikmat on LinkedIn.
Quality does not have to be complicated. It just has to work for you.
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