Hello, all!
What an interesting thread. I'm jumping in near the end of it, but that gives me a certain amount of emotionless objectivity.
The primary purpose of an objective is to let organizational members know what is important. The objective tells everyone, 'Focus your efforts on this and we will be more successful.' In some companies, sales growth might be a meaningful objective. I was at a company recently, and they said, "Sales growth? No, we want to keep sales the same and make more money off each one!" So for that firm, profitability and net margin were far more important than sales growth. Every organization has to examine their unique circumstances and decide what matters most.
The gradual movement of quality philosophy over the past thirty years is that quality is something that everybody does. It isn't just the work of the Quality Department. Quality is everyone's business. A rather tired catch-phrase, yes, but it sets up my feelings that a quality objective is whatever you need it to be. The ultimate goal of quality is to keep the organization viable and help it retain its customers. Whatever objectives will do that are terrific ‘quality objectives.’ It doesn’t matter that the objective doesn’t relate to traditional quality topics.
As far as I’m concerned, there are only a handful of requirements related to objectives in ISO 9001. They must be:
1) Documented (4.2.1a)
2) Measurable (5.4.1)
3) Consistent with the quality policy (5.4.1)
4) Established at relevant functions and levels (5.4.1)
5) Inclusive of objectives related to product; in other words, at least one objective must be related to the organization’s goods or services (5.4.1)
6) Reviewed periodically during management review (5.6.1)
7) Understood by employees in terms of how their achievement can be contributed to (6.2.2d)
There may be one or two other requirements I forgot, but that’s about it from ISO 9001. Anything else is an opinion. As you know, opinions make very bad audit criteria.
People from outside the quality field often react with anger and disillusionment when they are told things like, “Your quality objectives are not sufficiently quality related.” Can you blame them?
Craig
Have you ever wondered how a simple question can lead us into a chaos? If we, professionals (in a very loose term), cannot answer a simple question....what hope do we have for companies we serve....anyhow, this has been very interesting reading...and more than ever, i am convinced there is NO RIGHT ANSWERS to most of questions discussed in the forum......
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