Standards and discretion
The key to making standardization work is knowing what (and who) to standardize. Standards and procedures apply best to manual, hourly-wage workers. With professionals, who are paid to use professional discretion, you have to (1) be selective about what needs to be and can be standardized and (2) make sure you have buy-in. That's why one school of QA works from the ground up, facilitating the professionals' development of standards. This is the "classical psychoanalysis" of QA, and management isn't patient enough to wait till doomsday. It's easier and faster to tailor boilerplate standards in consultation with the professionals, so you aren't trying to control the wrong things. The key is to help the professionals understand that standardscan take care of the trivial decisions, leaving them free to make the important ones.
