Tragically, for so many that is exactly what it becomes. It all starts with leadership and how quality management is viewed. Unfortunately, I think the term QMS, and more specifically the "System" part, has some kind of hypnotic effect, altering good leadership sense. Or maybe I give too much credit. The directive is given, results are expected and the template is overlayed, forcing all kinds of change which becomes a chore in itself to manage. The resulting change that should have been profound, meaningful and lasting is, by nature of how it was forced into shape, superficial, a burden and short-lived... Oh I guess I could go on and on. Couldn't we all?
I wear a pendant watch and you would not believe (then again, maybe you would) how many times I wanted to hold my own hypnotherapy session, swinging the little thing back and forth and intoning "You will dooooo the right thiiiiiinnngg"
Seriously, the biggest problem I've seen with implementation is having a dozen or more managers slogging through their processes using their individually created Excel as a table to hold their data. The data must be searched over and over, to identify things like "Has the
FMEA update for process change #123 been done?" As a result of poorly designed and haphazardly used tools a new process is brought on line but several pieces of equipment never got their PMs set up; lines go down because materials forecasting is done based on how much was used last month versus how much will be needed next month; required actions for process changes don't get done.
And no one knows or can connect the dots because these things don't get reported to the quality manager except for when found in audits. You wouldn't believe how many times I asked different managers what tools we used to make sure everything in projects gets done (I had seen what they did use, those various spreadsheets), and they did look at me as though they were hypnotized. I kept saying "We really should have a standardized set of tools that make it easy to identify status of deliverables" and they just looked at me. Zombies?
It would help if the managers could learn to recognize the lost value due to consequences of these types of things. I presented my
Global Performance Audit plan to the guy in charge of North America auditing but he didn't understand it and he won't be implementing it.
Instead, when a consequence occurs it's natural to deal with symptoms and deal with the emergency. In fact, being a problem solver is much more celebrated in management circles than a problem preventer. As long as this attitude prevails we in QA will have plenty to do.
