This is a good time to examine the role and responsibilities of those who occupy Quality Management roles within the organisation.  What is their role, what do they actually do, and for what are they responsible?  Logically they are not responsible for the quality of the company’s product or service, others who are tasked with delivering the output have a responsibility for delivering correctly, for that is what Quality means.  The time has come to recognise that product and service delivery responsibility includes responsibility for the quality, in all its manifestations.  Given that responsibility and authority, those so tasked must also be correctly resourced, and logically this resource must include staff presently allocated to a Quality department or function.  Achieving this transition will remove the inter-department strife that so often besets organisations when the Quality function interfers with the activities of line managers.

So what becomes of Quality Managers and the ‘Quality ‘ departments?

This has been partly answered already for operational activities.  The actual post should be eliminated from the company structure.  Nothing is to replace it or eventually the cycle of empire building will recommence.  A new function - Systems Integrity - should be established, the title totally and adequately defining the role, its authorities and responsibilities.

‘Systems integrity’embraces the adaquacy application and outcome of the business management processes, and the deliverable from this process would be advice and assurance.  This arrangment would be welcomed by business managers generally who would (and should) be free to conduct their activities in a manner consistent with the responsibilities and authorities devolved to them.  Systems Integrity could, within larger organisations, report to other assurance functions in the organisation - e.g. Internal Audit.

Arguments against this restructuring of an organisation would require a senior management team that was well informed and committed to radical change because the defence against such a change would (mis)quote requirements from management standards such as ISO9001 & ISO14001.

The elimination of the traditional Quality department is an idea whose time has come, and which will bring efficiency improvements across the business along with a reduction in the day to day stresses that arise from an unclear allocation of responsibilities and authorities amongst managers generally.

A possible and increasingly poular option for delivering this assurance service is through a well briefed and controlled external contract source.

What the executives of the organization say and do affects the entire organization.  Employees respond to their total environment rather than the specially selected talks and memos sent out periodically by their top management.  Actions are always louder than words, and probably the most unfortunate example of this lies in the assertion that ‘our staff  are our most valuable asset.  The reality of this will be seen during a business downturn, when the going becomes difficult it is the ‘most valued asset’ that is sacrificed first.   In a similar fashion how often is the executive team seen to leave a defunct organization with a substantial benefit and pension, while the workers leave with a statutory redundancy payment, and it is not unknown for their pension to disappear with the organization and its executives.

One sore point with Western companies is the ratio between executive and average worker salaries.  Similar comparisons can be drawn between Western executive and Japanese executive salaries.

When conflicting signals are sent from above they will be apparent to everyone below. All managers need to recognize that the lowest paid employee is smart enough to know when he is being told a fairy tale. The common sense of common people should not be underestimated by managers who ought to be smart enough to know better.

A company culture cannot be changed by exhortation. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ will not work. Culture is beliefs and values. When the executive managers change the way they see customers, suppliers and employees, the company will change accordingly.  When attitudes change at the top the change will be reflected all through the organization.

What the executives of the organization say and do affects the entire organization.  Employees respond to their total environment rather than the specially selected talks and memos sent out periodically by their top management.  Actions are always louder than words, and probably the most unfortunate example of this lies in the assertion that ‘our staff  are our most valuable asset.  The reality of this will be seen during a business downturn, when the going becomes difficult it is the ‘most valued asset’ that is sacrificed first.   In a similar fashion how often is the executive team seen to leave a defunct organization with a substantial benefit and pension, while the workers leave with a statutory redundancy payment, and it is not unknown for their pension to disappear with the organization and its executives.

One sore point with Western companies is the ratio between executive and average worker salaries.  Similar comparisons can be drawn between Western executive and Japanese executive salaries.

When conflicting signals are sent from above they will be apparent to everyone below. All managers need to recognize that the lowest paid employee is smart enough to know when he is being told a fairy tale. The common sense of common people should not be underestimated by managers who ought to be smart enough to know better.

A company culture cannot be changed by exhortation. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ will not work. Culture is beliefs and values. When the executive managers change the way they see customers, suppliers and employees, the company will change accordingly.  When attitudes change at the top the change will be reflected all through the organization.

Key performance indicators are too often referred to as Quality measures, when in reality such classification does nothing to enhance a ‘buy-in’ to their significance as a worthwhile performance indicator. KPIs have to be ‘owned’ by a group or department having the ability and responsibility to influence the attribute being measured. Too often responsibility for an outcome is not coupled with an authority to actually change the outcome, and hence the indicated performance.

Locally determined (department) performance indicators are frequently pointless exercises in bureaucracy, designed to provide some visual illusion of managerial interest and control. Even when the measurement of such KPIs show evidence of change in a positive direction there is seldom a corresponding improvement in overall business performance. KPIs need to be derived from corporate objectives and targets, and for success must be focused on these corporate goals and directly supportive of them. If, for example, a business goal was to be the reduction in Order to Delivery cycle time, then individual department and functions should be required to show how their own KPIs are supportive of this objective. Only through the integration of overall business objectives and locally generated improvement measures can real performance improvement be attained.

Maximising performance across an entire organization is a delicate act of balancing that has to be achieved and subsequently supported by business managers. This can only happen when all departments have performance measures that reflect the company’s overall objectives. Trying to achieve everything will not work, and changing the objectives at frequent intervals serves only to discredit the entire improvement objective. Without a clear sense of purpose and consistent objectives across the entire organization it will never come close to achieving its full potential.

Prior to the introduction of today’s documented management systems the process of purchasing would have required a purchasing agent to identify suitable suppliers for any given product, who after negotiating terms and conditions would place purchase orders and subsequently receive the required product.

The delivery of product, and particularly in the case of hardware product, would have invoked an acceptance process where the goods having been subject to some level of inspection would be accepted, or rejected to the supplier as unsatisfactory. These arrangements, although not ideal, were common for decades until the arrival of formal documented management standards with their specific requirements and their inbuilt capacity to be misinterpreted.

The current (2008) version of ISO 9001, building on its predecessors, requires that a purchaser should ……. ‘evaluate suppliers based on their ability to supply’…. Nothing wrong with that until the requirement is taken up by the company bureaucrats. A misreading of the standard has commonly resulted in the development of ‘vendor control’ processes that do little to enhance business efficiency, or to improve the perceived quality of supplies. The stated benefit being improved supplier performance and reduced procurement cost. The simple fact is that it doesn’t work.

The idea of vendor assessment is sound, if done by a group having the necessary expertise and experience and provided as a support to the procurement function. Little of this is true in most of cases. Ask a supplier who appears and for what purpose as representing vendor control for their customer. Almost certainly a representative of the QA department, having a passing acquaintance with ISO based management systems and virtually no understanding of manufacturing engineering or management. These are the people who will determine the acceptability of the vendor and his continued status as a supplier. They claim to be able to determine from such nodding contact with an organisation just how that company will perform as a supplier. However it doesn’t end there.

It might be reasonable to conclude that the use of that vendor is a comparatively risk-free decision. But the QA function doesn’t actually believe this in most cases. Look at what happens when product arrives at the purchaser’s premises. It’s called receiving inspection, incurring a cost that is irrecoverable.

The cost of incoming inspection is a cost of procurement not normally calculated as such, but often allocated to an administrative overhead or to the QA costs of doing business. Given the forgoing explanation of the vendor assessment and selection process why do these organisations not believe in the efficacy of that assessment process? If they were to believe then receipt inspection would not happen. It would be seen as unnecessary. The outcome of some if not all inspection is a product deficiency requiring some attention and a recent assessment of a number of engineering organisations indicated a 25% probability of a material delivery having some reason for dispute with the supplier.

The conclusion surely is that the vendor assessment cost isn’t worth the expense and inconvenience since it demonstrably doesn’t improve anything. In this generalisation I will exclude the performance of high volume procurement, as for example in the motor industry, where the altogether different staffing and methods result in a different approach to vendor assessment approval and control.

So long as vendor assessment and approval is performed by staff having allegiance and responsibility other than to those charged with the procurement task nothing will improve. A step forward that would act as a driver for further change would be to change the procurement cost base from being one of material cost plus purchasing staff costs, to include all inspection and handling costs until the product was available for use.

In a cost sensitive organisation this new enlightenment could be the start of a real improvement across the entire procurement process.

This experience can be repeated daily in every area of business, and because it is so much the norm there is no serious attempt to change, to effect an improvement. In this we find the cause of this time wasting activity engaged in daily by millions of workers, managers and executives, these meetings had no purpose other than to work through an agenda.

I have experienced meetings where the supplied agenda and supporting material would have looked well for a royal visit. Where the agenda was well supplied with references and the participant list should have been a guarantee of a fast moving decision making and effective gathering, but still they failed to have any serious impact on the participants or the organisation they were part of.

Perhaps the worst of all meetings are those where a series of presentations have been planned. Individuals – or sometimes their teams – arrive to deliver what can only be called ‘Death by PowerPoint’, where the sub-agenda appears to be focussed on the best presentation slides regardless of content. The consequence of this battle for supremacy is a meeting that either exceeds its time allocation – where one was actually in place, or is rearranged as it proceeds to remove ‘less significant’ items from the agenda.

And then I recall a different scenario. Working at a senior level in a large organisation I had a department head whose meetings were different. People invited to his meetings were given a clear statement of purpose and timing. Meetings started on-time, and finished on-time, and were brief. Nobody arrived unprepared – at least not more than once – and contributions were brief and focussed on the meeting objectives. That was and is the difference between normal meetings and successful meetings.

When meetings have a clear purpose and are managed by a leaders who understand that purpose, digression is avoided and gatherings have value to the individual and the organisation.

Quality management processes are intended to support process improvement through the efforts of employee groups. Inevitably the activity of these working groups will involve participation in meetings where decisions are to be the outcome. It is an unfortunate fact that the meeting ethos will be set by what they see around them, by their experience of how it is done by their leaders and others, so the outlook is not good.

Managers and all who might be involved in the management of meetings of any sort must learn that while an agenda is a good idea the meeting should be driven by an Objective. Why are we here, what are we attempting to do? Any participant diverging from that line must be redirected to this objective – and that includes the meeting leader!

This is in no sense an overstatement of the way company managers view their employees.

While improvements are obviously possible within such an environment, it is also true that a significant proportion of staff is not directly involved with producing saleable product, but with administrative support. These employees are frequently seen in a different light to the manufacturing group, and it is apparent to us that any improvement process that bypasses administrative functions also misses the opportunity to achieve significant efficiency savings for the employer. However, an improvement program has to capture the imagination of the participants, while providing a mechanism for individuals and work groups to participate and be successful. It is also necessary for managers to encourage individual contributions and contribute their managerial ‘weight’ to the achievement of any improvement. All of this while not seeking to highjack the credit for any performance gain.

While considering the differences of work pattern and culture that is the norm for the administrative and support functions in these businesses, the similarity of work to staff working in service industries became apparent, where much of the activity is clerical and administrative. Whatever solution could be found to enable us to engage with these people would probably work regardless of the nature of the business. We were clear in our minds that long term improvement programs typical of manufacturing facilities would not be appropriate for administrative functions.

For many years we were attracted by the pragmatic teachings of the late Philip Crosby, author of Quality is Free and many similar books. The program defined in that book has been adapted world-wide to the benefit of countless organisations and individuals.
Less well know within the same tome is a program he chose to call ‘Make Certain.’ With some effort we adapted Make Certain to a 21st century European culture and sought an opportunity to trial the outcome.

An existing client gave us the opportunity to demonstrate its worth within an administrative workforce of 120 staff. Working with groups of around 20 individuals, each with a mixture of skills and department affiliation, we spent time explaining the process and encouraging their involvement and contribution to improve both overall and specific efficiencies and effectiveness. We too learned from this experience and were able to develop the program further.

For our client’s organisation the trial was a success because for perhaps the first time individuals understood the nature of the work process to which they contributed, and how this impacted on the surrounding processes. This understanding led to a desire to improve, and because local managers and supervisors were participants measurable performance improvements were achived.
This first trial of the ‘Make Certain’ program was a spectacular success. An estimated 10% increase in efficiency, as measured by the ‘work units’ produced by the staff involved, only 9 months from program implementation.

The up-front cost to the organisation – for training - was equivalent to a loss of 360 hours employed time – probably somewhat less working time! This coupled with a support cost estimated to be 20 man-days of management time.

Overall it cost the organisation 65 days of lost time to achieve a saving in the first year of 2700 hours ( 10% of 27000 hours, based on 120 staff and 230 working days per year.) What to do with 10% additional work capacity is a problem that would delight any business manager.

The entire process was initiated with minimum investment, employed no high profile specialists or techniques, and succeeded because the participants had the freedom to believe in themselves and test their own solutions.

Truly, as Phil Crosby said, Quality is Free.

At that time, and regretfully 30 years later, there is still much wrong with the conduct of both internal and third party audits. My own assessment of the evidence is that audit managers, and this frequently means business quality managers, use the internal audit process to make a point that they have failed to make in the management forum of their employers business. Having generated a series of spurious deficiency reports and comments, they wonder why nobody takes their input seriously. Reports are still being generated based on little more than the opinion of the auditor, and amalgamated together to form what is presented as a pending disaster for all involved in the business processes.
These auditors, have for the most part little if any understanding of business management, or even an appreciation of the business objectives of their employer.

Disruptive and potentially destructive auditing can never be local in its consequences. Those who experience such auditing leave it with a sense of injustice for themselves and contempt for the audit process, which impacts on other audits and auditors regardless of their own performance.

Destructive auditors impose their own views on organisations and their systems. believing they know better than their management.
Destructive auditors report simple system errors without adequate investigation.
Destructive auditors create non-conformances from assumptions and possibilities.
Destructive auditors create conflict.

Positive auditors work on the basis of co-operation, and an interest in improving the management system in order to increase its value to the stakeholders of the business.
However, changing the attitudes and audit style of an established auditor or audit team is in my opinion a lost cause. Auditing is as much a social activity as it is a technical task, and changing social attitudes can take generations, primarily because of the earlier damage done by bad auditing practices. The route to change is a change of audit team, and the current economic climate provides an opportunity for such change.

The key element of the speech was that if ‘my’ company (i.e. the speakers company) is to improve, get better at what it does, this has to happen one person at a time - I have to contribute by getting better at what I do.

This personal effort is not an alternative to corporate efforts of improvement, but it is a key element of the overall business performance. By personal effort each individual shows an example to others, while making the task of others more successful and rewarding. ‘By being more effective I make others more effective’.

He went on to talk of individual personal performance  indices: – don’t have a pending tray, either respond directly to the problem or ensure someone is working on it; return phone calls the same working day; respond to Email messages as though someone is actually present in the room with you waiting for your decision.  Each and all of these are simple and reasonable performance measures and objectives that we could all subscribe to, and yet we don’t!

This man was the CEO of one of the largest and most prestigious organisations in the USA at the time.  He and his corporation have won numerous awards for achievement and for public service, but here he described performance ideals that apply to us all. If it is good enough for a CEO surely it is good enough for everyone.

From a study of both standards there is much that is common in the documented requirements, and integrated management systems have become the consequence of this commonality. It would follow that an organisation can legitimately claim to be operating an environmentally friendly (and ISO14K compliant) business without having formally adopted the 14K standard through third party assessment and registration.

The ISO9001 document allows for the organisation to take cognisance of requirements not arising from the customer, or statutory legislation, but adopted through choice by the organisation. So apart from the registration, and the public recognition(?) that is expected to follow, the ISO14K standard has little to offer an organisation with a sensibly implemented ISO9001 management system and a determination to develop it sensibly. Herein lies the real problem with the ISO standards as generally implemented and publicly recognised.

With ISO9001 having the potential to combine environmental with quality issues in its scope, the 14K standard is of little value – as a standard. But it isn’t being used as a standard for management purposes, but for registration and publicity. Arguably the only real beneficiaries of ISO14001 are the registrars. But is this situation peculiar to the environmental standard? I think not.

The ISO9001 standard has as its title – Quality management systems. Followers of the prescribed rules are led to believe the outcome to be ever improving quality. Quality of what? Certainly not the product, there is no claim for that to happen. Any improvement that happens is an improvement to the system. What constitutes an actual improvement seems not to have been seriously considered by either the ISO standards authority, the registrars, or those who pay for the assessment and registration process.

The real problem lies in the nomenclature and the consequential expectation of all stakeholders. Quality management is not simply following systems, but understanding and managing work objectives and practices. ISO9001 is not about quality management, it may be quality control, even quality assurance, but it is not quality management.