My Conclusions to “Things Quality Management Systems (QMS)”

This article contains further recommendations to the opportunities I discussed in my “Things QMS” articles:

In my Aug-2022 article I stated that despite gaining an ISO 9001 accreditation of its QMS, an organization will still encounter significant challenges in its quest for effective improvement. For example, two challenges that are often faced are:

• organizations are on their own to tabulate and assess the feedback provided to them by their customers, suppliers, and employees. Whereas industry specific (but anonymous) non-conformity data could be shared by the ISO QMS group reducing the time an organization takes to determine potential root causes as well as the time to assess the applicability of an industry best practice to its own circumstance.
• allowing themselves to conduct once-per-year management reviews regardless of the organization’s size and complexity its QMS scope statement. If an organization allows that to occur it will only weaken, if not fully defeat, its attempt to create and sustain its culture of quality in a timely manner.

In that last article I also stated that I would discuss the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) in a ‘good’ QMS. To that point, HRM is a necessity of a ‘good’ QMS for any organization. I am confident that the ISO group has that same opinion of the importance of HRM because the ISO 9001 QMS standard includes most of the actual recommendations contained in ISO’s main HRM guidance documents … ISO 10667-1 (requirements for clients) and ISO 10667-2 (requirements for service providers).

So, my recommendations herein come from what I feel are the biggest opportunities for the ISO group itself to address within the spirit of reasonable, timely, and effective continuous improvement. Those recommendations are based on my own experiences in the workforce and I do have a some data that I am confident would validate them as applicable to many organizations who struggling with their own pursuit of quality.

Finally, the custodians of the various QMS standards need to be more efficient in how the help organizations gain and sustain compliance with a QMS standard. To wit, I offer some suggestions herein on how the ISO group could gain such improvements as well as increase the number of QMS Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and ‘good’ QMS auditors because the lack of timely innovation from the custodians of the QMS standards and the recent three years of pandemic isolationism has diminished the number of new vocations to “Things QMS”.

The biggest opportunities for the ISO 9001 group

The following three obstacles to obtaining a ‘good’ QMS have appeared in varying but always notable degrees in many of my post secondary studies work circumstances:

• lagging awareness
• mixed or conflicting vocabularies and dialects
• unbalanced/unreasonable expectations.

The next sub-sections describe what these obstacles are and how they manifest themselves. They also include some mitigations towards reducing their likelihood of occurrence or hopefully eliminating them outright.

Lagging Awareness

The ISO 9001 standard was first published by the ISO group in 1987 … over three decades ago and that doesn’t even speak to the numerous decades prior to that in which several other standards and guidelines existed (including the ones that lead to the birth of ISO 9001 (such as MIL-Q-9858, MIL-I-45208, BS 5750)).

And yet it remains all-to-true that most persons do not encounter “Things QMS” until they are in the workforce and even then, it can take a couple of years for them to align their plans, actions, and results with their organization’s culture of quality.

In short, the amount of time organizations are taking to gain a ‘good’ QMS is handicapped by the lack of awareness to the ISO 9001 standard that persons have when they first enter the workforce.  It is often the case that a ‘good’ awareness to “Things QMS” will only come to the forefront of organization’s culture of quality when it attempts to gain a third-party certification of its QMS (with standards like ISO 9001, AS 9001, TL 9000, ISO 13485, and ISO 16949). This is disappointing since compliance with QMS standards (especially ISO 9001) is very much purposed to identify how improvements to customer, supplier, and employee satisfaction can be obtained in a timely and effective manner. 

From a practical perspective, the lagging awareness obstacle manifests itself in many ways within an organization including but not limited to gaining consensus on:

• the purposes and benefits of a having a QMS, 
• what is and how to apply a quality policy, and
• whether or not the organization’s actual behaviours and outcomes need improvement.

To reduce this lag, the ISO group could sponsor the inclusion of the ISO 9001 standard (and the guidance and best practices thereof) into the appropriate high school and post-secondary (undergraduate) course curriculums. The ISO group could similarly inject itself into the various continuous (MBA or Corporate Director) education and certification programs persons aspire to undertake after they have entered the workforce. To this later point, although the topics of risk, management review, and governance are discussed within the curriculums of those institutions, those discussions rarely, if at all, make any direct mention the ISO QMS standard. This oversight can be the cause of many delays … especially if persons react in adversely to persons from ‘quality’ teams/groups trying to complete their roles by using those very tools some quality people think are ‘out of their pay grade’, etc.

If the teaching materials used in high school, post-secondary (undergraduate), as well as the MBA and Corporate Director programs become more direct in their reference to and use of the relevant ISO QMS standards, today’s organizations would save countless and often futile hours in their attempts to get and sustain QMS knowledge into their staff’s behaviours and actual work outcomes. In short, the initial training and awareness to ISO QMS standards needs to be placed into learning institutions … which is a more cost-effective way for an organization to ensure its staff have acquired and hopefully improved their core communication and technical skills.

Such a pro-active approach would also overcome two other issues many organizations and their staff suffer from the obstacle of a having a lagging/re-active awareness to ‘Things QMS’:

1. the fear of audits. For example, and unfortunately, you may have also seen persons in the workforce deliberately take vacation, schedule themselves into meetings (elsewhere) or phone in sick during the days that an audit is scheduled for their work location.
2. the lack of a healthy quantity of as well as highly skilled and experienced QMS auditors. Again, and unfortunately, the majority of QMS internal auditors have short lifespan durations for reasons including and not limited to their own management telling them (directly or indirectly) that possessing auditing skills is not a priority OR that governance is not a valued way of gaining an accurate big picture view of the strategy, tactical, and operations of the organization. Similarly, and unfortunately, many persons who become QMS auditors do so in the later portion of their work careers. So although they may have accumulated knowledge and even wisdom over their own careers, persons just entering the work force for the first time tend to hold a perception that auditors do not add value because that they only appear infrequently and/or at fleeting moments of importance to the organization – such as during ‘check-the-box’ audits, RCA and non-conformance handling activities, or otherwise annual only quality planning assessment events.

Mixed or Conflicting Vocabularies and Dialects

This obstacle towards gaining a ‘good’ QMS pertains to the effectiveness of all communications within an organization. More specifically, the vocabulary / phraseology / jargon used by persons in an organization can be unclear or even conflicting – and that only leads to further delays in the organization’s need to share knowledge, requirements, guidance, or build consensus amongst its key stakeholders.

Organizations are often and rightly so staffed by persons with different academic and business type/sector backgrounds. However, although each staff member might speak in the same language, the ability for the organization to have effective communication amongst them as well as with its customers and suppliers is often reduced by the language nuances that exist between persons with varying academic and work backgrounds. 

This is not just a “you say ‘toe-mato,’ I say ‘ta-mato’” thing.  The very context as well as the intended results of our communications can be adversely affected by differences in vocabularies and dialects.

An obvious answer to this issue is standardizing our business languages prior to a person first entering the work force. However, since everyone doesn’t speak the same language nor go to the same school let alone have the same SME/teachers/professors or textbooks, differences in dialects will always exist.  Nevertheless, having the “Things QMS” subject taught within academic institutions as well as a must have component in an organization’s “what it is like to work here” information is far better than the current situation of pretending that there is no dialect battle going on within the organization’s new employee hiring and onboarding programs, risk, and management review activities, and/or its audit planning, readiness, and reporting activities.

Unbalanced/Unreasonable Expectations

This obstacle towards gaining a ‘good’ QMS pertains to an all too regular lack of a reasonable balance in just who is accountable for quality in the organization. Specifically, most organizations agree that everyone is responsible for quality but very few organizations are structured let alone operated to also hold everyone accountable for quality in the very actions they expected to complete for the work assigned to them. The classic example of this is the circumstance in which an organization tries to ‘test’ quality into its results (… rather than first specifying, then designing/integrating quality into a process or a deliverable before it undergoes its verification or validation).

This obstacle exists for two distinct reasons. Firstly, within the QMS standards community, there is still a discussion on whether or not a single person fulfilling the ‘quality representative’ role is needed. That discussion only continues to hurt how well let alone quickly QMS standards are embraced because it often results in the “here, you handle it” approach to every quality objective and issue because that person is “the” quality representative – whereas a ‘good QMS’ is the responsibility of everyone in the organization. 

Note: So, it is clear for mid to large sized organizations I am not a proponent of a singular ‘quality representative’ role because everyone in an organization is paid by the same means (… its actual revenues/profits) and I believe every employee is both responsible and accountable for their contributions to quality. More practically, the purposes and nature of the Quality Assurance and Quality Control Manager are different so having both activities managed by distinct persons who each have membership on the senior management team will be a good thing (just as it is with other mid-to-large sized organizations where separate ‘voices’/representatives exist on the management team for sales, marketing, customer support, etc.).

Secondly, the hierarchical management structures used within organizations inherently allow for the division of authority, responsibility, and accountability which like the first reason (above) often results in the “blame game” and a limited accountability of the culture of quality to a “chosen few”.  That is, organizations are readily prone to mispresenting “Things QMS” as only a Quality group/department concern.  It is like they somehow believe that quality is effectively obtained by auditing/sampling their various product or service offerings. Whereas; nothing could be further from the truth because quality belongs to everyone! Specifically, if your role is not contributing to the value and efficiency of the organization then your role does not need to exist (as the primary objective of every organization is to make a profit in fair, ethical, and effective ways).

To resolve this obstacle, ‘Things QMS’ and in specific, how to obtain quality effectively needs to be thought of and taught as “the” goal of everyone in the organization. Furthermore, the accountability to quality goals should not be reserved for only those (managers or leads) of the quality department/groups. In short, a ‘good’ QMS is fact-based and as such, everyone in the organization must be responsible for and held accountable to its desire for fact-based decisions and behaviours.

Conclusion

The Plan-Do-Act-Check (PDCA) methodology of ISO 9001 is a valuable tool for both its users as well as its authors/custodians to use in the majority of the circumstances they find themselves in. Furthermore, the likelihood of an organization creating and maintaining a ‘good’ QMS only increases if that organization regularly assesses itself for effectivity … AND … if the custodians of the QMS standards regularly assess those standards. 

Note: To this last point, in one of my previous articles I had a diagram that depicted the revision history of the various QMS standards in order to demonstrate the amount of time the custodians of those standards have taken to change the standards. To that lagging, I also suggested in that same article that the QMS  custodians (and in particular, the ones of the ISO 9001 standards group itself) need to embrace innovation timelier because you won’t find a recent graduate let alone a truly responsible and accountable employee anywhere in the world who says “Hey, let’s wait another three to ten years for an ISO standard or best practices group to answer this question for us.”

In short, the ISO 9001 QMS group needs to ensure all of the intended user audience (of every employee at every level in the organization’s structure/hierarchy) is engaged timelier and then to sustain that engagement in ways other than currently required or allowed by the ISO 9001 QMS standard. 

To these very points, ISO 9001 QMS custodians and auditors should endevor to:

• help institutionalize ISO 9001 QMS education and training along the entire human life continuum. Specifically, a person’s awareness to “Things QMS” (and QMS standards like ISO 9001) should first occur in their (high school and post-secondary) academic life and then regularly within their work life . 
• vigorously remove any tolerance to any QMS certified organization’s actual practice of explaining “Things QMS” only after it first decides to gain its certification in a QMS standard and/or only during the time immediately surrounding each QMS audit. Specifically, tolerance of such behaviour (as a minor non-conformity) is a path to:
  • to mediocrity (at best); or
  • outright failure and lengthy delays in gaining increased return on investments.

Pursuit of the above recommendations aligns QMS standard owners, industry wide best practices groups and everyone in the workforce to a more effective pursuit of quality and the intended ability to make/increase profits in fair, legal, ethical and timely ways.

And now, my “Things QMS” epilogue

I hope you have enjoyed my “Things QMS” articles. I am very appreciative of the time you spent to read them. I am also privileged to have gained your feedback about them and their relevance to your own desire for growth in QMS knowledge and success.

Finally, I hope that you also will continue to walk-the-talk of “Things QMS” through your own career … acquiring and sustaining informed QMS knowledge and behaviours within each work circumstance and career development plan/roadmap situation you choose to embrace.

Annex-1 … QMS Awareness Survey

Over the years I have informally collected data on QMS awareness. For example, as manager during my fellow employee’s job interview, onboarding, or during their first 90 days assessment I would interview them as to help ensure the organization’s improvement planning and results was, in fact, accounting for relevant QMS related needs/objectives effectively.

The survey is available (in MS-WORD or PDF) format via email request to John@JANDLOI.com . 

It has a total of twenty questions in it. Depending on how you answered its first question you may only need to answer as few as five other questions in total.

Results of the survey will be published in a future ‘Things QMS – Epilogue Amendment’ document. For example, in the next 90 days, I would love to get over 1000 people to respond to it.

Please note: several of the for free online survey providing tools do not allow for the ideal construction of my survey. For example, they have:

1. restrictions for the total number of:
   • questions allowed; and/or
   • answer choices to a question allowed.
2. an inability to:
   • capture responses to short answer-based questions; and/or
   • control the navigation to which of the remaining questions a respondent needs to complete (based on the very answers they gave to a preceding question.

If you know of a “free” survey tool that can meet those needs please contact me; otherwise, I am in process of creating an ‘app’ for that very purpose.

Annex-2 … URLs of Interest

The following URLs are ones relevant to the perspective of this article’s mentioning of post-secondary MBA and Corporate Director certification programs. Specifically, they serve only as examples of such programs and they are not listed here with the intention of being a carte-blanche endorsement or critique of them.

• Institute of Corporate Directors
• What is a typical MBA Program Curriculum
• Project Management Institute … which, back in 1999, gained its ISO 9001 accreditation but I currently trying to determine unclear if the PMI is still third-party certified to that QMS standard. The PMI professes compliance with ISO 17024 “Conformity Assessments – general requirements for bodies operating certification of persons”.

Annex-3 …  Business Management Systems (BMS) ‘house’/building blocks

All effective BMS systems are built upon a easily accessible foundation of process and technical knowledge. Furthermore, a ‘good’ BMS is created and sustained by using a ‘good’ QMS which is built upon the appropriate use of industry standards and best practices. 

In short, the building blocks of a ‘good’ BMS include a ‘good’ QMS. To that very point, the generic goals for governance as well as the respective information, goals, frameworks, and tools and several of the more significant 3^rd party resources implicated by a ‘good’ QMS are shown in the diagram below:

Annex-4 … It is all about the People in the Organization

I hope you agree with me that a ‘good’ QMS has a HRM component. So, to the very point, I hope you also agree that:

1. organizations are only as good as their people. 
2. to improve an organization, its management needs to regularly assess the effectiveness of the actions taken by as well as the skills/experiences it makes available to its people. 
3. continuous education and training are two of the most fundamental methods for improving effectiveness in an appropriate and timely manner. Specifically, within the hierarchy of intervention effectiveness, without education and training, each of the other methods that management might choose to intervene to improve the organization will likely fail simply due to lack of awareness by the persons implicated by the changes intended. Furthermore, without training for the persons implicated, the intended changes being attempted are also likely to fail or, minimally, be inconsistently supported.