Best place in QMS to manage Quality Objectives

T

triver525

I am in the middle of rewriting my client's quality manual and I wanted to get your opinions about where is the best place to document the company's Quality Objectives.

Quality Objectives are directly referenced in sections 4.2.1.a, 5.1.c, 5.3.c, 5.4.1, and 7.1.a (among others I'm sure) and indirectly referenced in many other places. I have been reviewing the huge volume of example quality manuals publicly available and I don't see much consistency in where the actual management defined quality objectives are documented.

The best I can see is that there are two schools of thought:
  1. Quality Objectives are listed in Section 5.4.1 of the Quality Manual (typical template).
  2. Quality Objectives are documented in a seperate document (eg. Appendix A1).

I can see the benefits of both but I would like to hear some of your opinions.
 

Marcelo

Inactive Registered Visitor
Separate. Being part of the quality manual uses the old idea of having requirements from each clause from the standard on the manual which really sucks.
 
T

triver525

So an appendix is probably the way to go then? I was under the impression that appendices are uncontrolled.
 

Marcelo

Inactive Registered Visitor
A separate document for quality objectives would better. Not an appendix.

Regarding controlled documents, you decide what is controlled or not (a document defining and maintaining quality objectives surely will be).
 

normzone

Trusted Information Resource
If you do it in the Quality Manual you need to rev the manual whenever you change your objectives. I'd document it in the Management Review meeting minutes, but any place you want to track it will work for you, as long as it's auditable.
 

John Broomfield

Leader
Super Moderator
normzone,

Not necessarily. You can avoid having to rev the whole manual by having separate rev control over each Exhibit to the manual for policy, objectives, organization, sequence and interaction of processes diagram etc...

But as you suggest, a living Management System Performance Report is a good place to maintain quality objectives and the progress toward meeting them.

John
 

AndyN

Moved On
Surely they can simply be part of the management review and documented as a matter of record from that? Why does everything have to be part of some manual or an appendix? It doesn't seem appropriate to me and when I was implementing management systems, putting them into a document which rarely saw the light of day, doesn't seem right. Putting them into the management review as a matter of planning (isn't that what it's there for, in part?) seems to be a much more appropriate place...
 

Colin

Quite Involved in Discussions
I tend to use a simple template like the 1 attached these days, you can include it in management review if you wish or as a separate document.
 

Attachments

  • Objectives Blank.docx
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G

greenfen

The company I work for does not have a single document which lists all the separate objectives etc. in fact it hasn't even published the top level business objectives to the rest of the organisation, so it's not clear to employees where it's heading :eek:what we do have is an appraisal system (a 'personal development review'), part of which reviews individuals objectives for the coming year, and so is documented in that way. The problem is, they're probably not measurable at this stage. My idea is to extract the agreed objectives from the individual PDR's, place them into a single 'list of objectives' and create measurable KPI's. Would this be sufficient?
 

John Broomfield

Leader
Super Moderator
The company I work for does not have a single document which lists all the separate objectives etc. in fact it hasn't even published the top level business objectives to the rest of the organisation, so it's not clear to employees where it's heading :eek:what we do have is an appraisal system (a 'personal development review'), part of which reviews individuals objectives for the coming year, and so is documented in that way. The problem is, they're probably not measurable at this stage. My idea is to extract the agreed objectives from the individual PDR's, place them into a single 'list of objectives' and create measurable KPI's. Would this be sufficient?

greenfen,

"Good people are defeated by bad systems".

Setting up individual employees to battle their system and compete against each other to fulfill their personal objectives strikes me as wasteful, fear inducing and ineffective.

Why not establish system objectives (these are related to your organization's mission) and objectives for each of the processes in your system so process teams help each other to fulfill process and system objectives?

This also happens to conform to ISO 9001 and its derivative management system standards.

John
 
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