Turtle Diagrams and Quality Management Systems (QMS)

A few weeks ago, I posted a turtle diagram depicting a “QMS Consulting” process. In this paper, I discuss how turtle diagrams fit into the quality manual of an organization’s QMS.

A brief recap of what a Turtle Diagram is and its purposes

A turtle diagram is a way an organization can help its employees understand a process. For example, a turtle diagram depicts the landscape or map of a process enabling the persons executing that process to see how they will contribute to the achievement of the process and its outcomes.

• A turtle diagram demonstrates how the organization:
  • has identified the essential value add activities required by a process.
  • monitors the overall wellness of a process to determine if further action is warranted. 

When one turtle diagram is coupled with those of the other processes of the organization, management can readily demonstrate compliance between its actual performance and its strategic business plan. 

• Turtle diagrams form a valuable link between the organization’s goals and the various procedures or instructions that detail how given tasks are to be completed to reach those goals.

How Turtle Diagrams fit into an organization’s QMS

Organizations aspire to make a fair profit in safe, legal, as well as readily manageable and sustainable ways. To do so organizations use their business management systems and various training, awareness, and process controls to ensure that the required work is being completed as intended. Equally so, if the required work is not being completed as intended, then those same business management systems must ensure that the processes or resources undergo changes enabling success within the current business realities, priorities, and obligations.

• An organization is working as intended when it meets or exceeds the client, statutory, regulatory and its own self-imposed requirements within the defined cost and schedule targets.

Business management systems can be defined within and then overseen for correct outcomes by the methods and objectives listed in an organization’s QMS quality manual. For example, QMS requirement standards (like ISO 9001, ISO 13485, TL 9000, AS 9000, IATF 16949) help an organization to gain success in a timely manner by ensuring that the criteria on which results are checked against are not only planned and measured but are also assessed regularly for effectiveness.

• What an organization does to delight its customers, suppliers and employees is defined by the scope and context statements listed within its QMS quality manual. 
• Turtle diagrams and process interaction diagrams can be used within the QMS quality manual to document what processes exist, how they work, as well as how they interact with each other.

The core methods promoted by the QMS requirement standards for assessing an organization’s success are:

1. the measurement of the outputs emanating from a process. For example, the typical measurements made include those demonstrating the organization’s success with:
   • Conformance To Quality (CTQ).
   • On-Time Delivery (OTD).
   • the perception of customer satisfaction.

2. the (corrective and preventative) actions associated with issues found by the governance of the processes implicated. For example, such actions are the results of the organization’s management review, internal audit, non-conformity root cause analysis, as well as its continuous improvement and risk management programs.

Does having a QMS make an organization more likely to succeed?

The answer is ‘yes’ if:

1. the organization establishes and sustains traditions, programs, and/or events that contribute to the objectives and culture espoused by all the processes and measurements defined in its QMS quality manual.

2. the QMS quality manual is simple enough to get things started but is also robust enough to grow with the organization.

Wait a second! 

Is not having the right skilled and experienced persons using the proper tooling enough for the organization to be successful? Isn’t that especially so if the organization has a best-in-class change management, as well as issue/risk identification, prioritization, and escalation processes; and uses peer review as an integral means to gain requirement compliant and robust implementation of its plans or designs?

The answer to that is ‘no’ because any process along with peer review of the actual outputs of a process also needs to be assessed for their effectiveness; and that assessment, and the awareness to it, is more complete when real-time mechanisms exist in the organization to prevent it from encountering or worse yet getting stuck within ‘cannot see the forest for the trees’ circumstances.

In short, organizations will encounter changes and risks regularly. To efficiently navigate through those changes and risks the organization’s business management systems must provide real-time fact-based awareness to ‘what is helping/working’ and ‘what is broken/not helping’. A good QMS provides that awareness.

• The QMS is the voice of the customer as well as the regulatory and statutory organizations implicated. As such it helps ensure that the organization always has:
  • fresh perspective and passion for creating problem solving or trouble shooting
  • innovative thinking and experience
  • expertise in consensus building
  • integrity and transparency
• for it to assess its effectiveness at:
  • reducing risk
  • generating and/or discovering new and appropriate opportunities
  • obtaining faster and safer growth through measurements, process controls and appropriate improvements made to the processes and/or products implicated
  • expediting visibility to errors (e.g., non-conformity/compliance circumstances)

enabling creation of/improvement in near and long-term value.
Summary and Conclusion

Turtle diagrams can be simple, one-page process maps positioned within an organization’s QMS quality manual. Turtle diagrams enable the knowledge for how a process is intended to operate to be quickly communicated throughout the organization such that the process’s performance and its actual results are assessed and when necessary modified.

Whether your organization is one person or thousands of persons in size, enabling it to be successful is about getting it to the point at which everyone in it understands what is needed, when is it needed and how best to implement that need. Quality Management Systems are purposed to do just that.