QMS Improvement - Where To Start?

[Big Jim]

Having someone else in management who understands and respects quality principles is already a major win. My biggest difficulty here is getting the ownership to understand that wanting to do better is not enough when no one understands or will own the work that needs done.

As a retired consultant I can unequivocally concur. I always sought to get top management on board and have turned down projects when I determined the top management was not on board.

 

[Jen Kirley]

I often wish we could shed the "Quality" term because it scares people so. It is treated as a Jedi religion. What is quality? It is simply Doing things well to result in customer satisfaction. Doing stuff right so we are successful. ISO 9001 is still viewed as some kind of arduous and maybe painful initiation ceremony when the standard pretty closely resembles every business plan template or tool kit I have seen. If you can convince people in the organization of that, then buy in is easier.

You have no doubt already identified what your customers care about, what might go wrong while trying to meet their requirements and what will be done. That is context, risk and planning.

Okay, people are doing things from memory. The term for that is organizational knowledge. Are they doing the right thing? If yes, good. Your determining their ability to repeatedly do the right thing is competency. Record how and when you decided that and you're good. Documenting processes - how things are done - should be based on that which would be bad if people got it wrong or the knowledgeable person disappeared and a new person needed to learn what to do.

If they are not doing the right thing, what you do in response is called corrective action. That gets documented, you get to claim credit for it. Actions done to make sure there are no repeats are important learnings, both to give yourselves credit for that and to make tweaks if you want to make the actions better still. Doing that is preventive action.

If you take notice of what you did while correcting a process mistake in a different process or area, that is preventive action too. Repeating this effort is thought of as Continual improvement and Actions taken to address risk. Keep records of these to share with managers in Management Review.

What I am trying to say is, don't make this harder than it needs to be. I often suggest Craig Cochran's book ISO 9001:2015 In Plain English because it does such a nice job of demystifying the standard.

I hope this helps.

 

[John Predmore]

I often wish we could shed the "Quality" term because it scares people so. It is treated as a Jedi religion. What is quality?

Brilliant point, Jen. When I started in the field, it was universally called Quality Control, and later, Quality Assurance. In 1997, the professional organization ASQC dropped the 'C' from their name. I would add the comment that Quality is fundamentally Common Sense. It is good to recall the lessons of Deming's 14 Points (1982).

 

[Jen Kirley]

Thank you @John Predmore. I want to add that there is no need to dream up all this stuff from the beginning. Use the site's Resources and Attachments links to find tools ready to use and edit if needed. I attached a series of Risk-based Planning tools and just recently remade my Cost of Poor Quality calculator that also tracks supplier performance (that is, the user can choose not to involve money while tracking issues with received goods and services).

 

[Joseph B.]

I often wish we could shed the "Quality" term because it scares people so. It is treated as a Jedi religion. What is quality? It is simply Doing things well to result in customer satisfaction. Doing stuff right so we are successful. ISO 9001 is still viewed as some kind of arduous and maybe painful initiation ceremony when the standard pretty closely resembles every business plan template or tool kit I have seen. If you can convince people in the organization of that, then buy in is easier.

Totally aligned with you! I had the greatest breakthrough when we stayed away from the "scary" terminology and just convinced the orgs that this is the plan for customer satisfaction. We did still use PDCA - but put it in as simple a language as possible so folks bought in.