Make your matrix certificate work

Last week I introduced the concept of a matrix certificate, and I thought it could be useful if I explained the approach in a little more detail. Mostly the idea is self-explanatory, but it is worthwhile to keep one or two points in mind so they don't trip you up.

When ISO first introduced its management system standards, each certificate was tied to a specific location where specific work was done. So the certificate was printed with an address and a scope statement, as in the example to the left.* 

But many organizations have more than one location, and often the processes are identical from one site to the next. There is not a lot of variety, for example, between this McDonald's and that one. So organizations began asking their Certifying Bodies** if there were any way to group multiple locations under a single certificate. Since the CB's, for their part, had to manage a lot of redundant information for all of these sites, they were keen to agree. And so CB's began to introduce the "matrix certificate."

A matrix certificate works just like a standalone certificate, except that the address and scope are replaced by a matrix: Site 1 does this kind of work, Site 2 does that kind of work, and so on. There is no requirement for a literal matrix on the certificate itself, so long as the information is there. A matrix is a convenient format when there is a large number of sites to consider. When there are only two or three, the CB might simply use paragraphs, as in the example to the right immediately below.***  

The other place you see a genuine matrix is in the internal paperwork that supports the certification: at the CB, and at the organization itself. These internal matrices look something like the one that I show at the bottom of this post, and they correlate the infor­mation needed to manage the audit program. This starts by listing the sites and their scopes or func­tions, just like on the certif­icate. But then the internal matrix also tracks how many people work at each site. This is because there is a formula used by all the CB's to determine how many audit-days**** they have to schedule at each location. The formula uses both number of employees and type of work as inputs to the calculation: a big plant needs more audit-hours than a small plant, and manufacturing requires more attention than HR or sales. Finally, the matrix should track how long the audit cycle is for each site. Normally with a multi-site certificate, the company headquarters is audited every year; also, manu­fac­turing is likely to be audited every year. The example I give below has one site for each of those functions. But then it also shows three sites that mostly do engineering or product design, that follow exactly the same procedures, and that are therefore more or less interchangeable. In order to reduce the overall audit costs (and to simplify scheduling), the CB has put each of these on a three-year cycle, so that they rotate. In any given year the CB plans audits in three locations; but over the three years before recertification, they visit all five sites.

On the whole, using a matrix certificate is a good way to control your certification expenses if you are in a situation where it works for you. But of course there are risks. The main risk is that one of the critical entries in your matrix will change: for example, you might have heavy layoffs at one site, or (conversely) hire a whole new department. Either way, you have to make sure to report the change to your CB in a timely way, so that they can recalculate your audit days. One way or another, this might change your plans for the year.

Or you might move functions from one site to another. Since each function makes its own contribution to the calculation of audit days, this move might make a difference to the result even if the number of employees involved is not high. A specialized technical function, for example, might employ only a few people; but it might require a lot of Quality equipment to make sure it operates correctly, and in some cases all that infrastructure might have to be audited.

Finally, there is a risk that two different sites are supposed to be doing the same work according to the same procedures, but one site decides to implement local improvements without telling the other. I have seen this happen, where an organization had two Distribution Centers. One was more or less a glorified shipping dock at the far end of a building that did a lot of other work; the other was a pure Distribution Center with no other functions. Back when the organization first codified their written procedures, someone wrote a single set of logistics documents and told both organizations to use them. But in the intervening years, the Site Manager of the standalone Distribution Center brought in a lot of equipment to modernize his operations. It was exciting to visit, because every time I arrived they had improved something new. But somehow the word never got back to the first operation. I had workers from that one tell me with a straight face, "We have exactly the same procedures they have there," when there was no longer anything in common. And I had to explain, "No you don't. And at the very least your documentation has to be updated to reflect that reality."

Note that when changes like this take place, it can undermine the logic behind a matrix certification. The justification for auditing Site 3 in place of Site 4 and Site 5 is that they follow the same procedures in all three sites so you'll see the same evidence anyway. Once that is no longer true, it is harder to keep down the number of audits.  

It is also true that breakthrough improvements on such a scale are mostly the exception rather than the rule. And if there is a chance for your organization to make breakthrough improvements, having to replan your audit program is a small price to pay!

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* I found this illustration online by searching for "sample iso 9001 certificate." I have no professional, personal, or financial connection to the organization in question. 

** A Certifying Body (CB) is the registrar that send out your external auditor, manages the audit paperwork, and issues your certificate. There are lots of CB's in the world. If you look at the certificates that I posted above as examples, the first is from TÜV SÜD, and the second is from DEKRA. These are both well-known CB's. Just by coincidence, I have never worked with either one.  

*** Again, I found this illustration by searching online and have no connection with the company. 

**** One audit-day means one full day of auditing by one auditor. So four audit-days might mean one auditor for four days, or two auditors for two days, or one auditor for three days plus another who joins him for only one of those days, or any other combination that adds up to four.     

           

How do you certify a big corporation?

Last summer, in the middle of a podcast about something else, Kyle Chambers raised a question: how is it possible to certify a really big company to a standard like ISO 9001? His point was that really big companies have so many parts that they can't all play together. (I mention the podcast in this post here.) Kyle might have meant the question rhetorically, but of course he is right. If you have scores of locations spread across multiple continents—engaged in dozens of lines of work—how can you possibly coordinate them all into a single management system? How can you possibly certify anything so complex?

You can't. So you break it in pieces.

More exactly, you divide your really big company into sub-units of a useful size, and then make each sub-unit responsible for its own certification. Then in your sales and marketing literature you speak of the company as a unified whole, announce that "Con­glom­erated Enterprises has been proudly certified to ISO 9001 since ...," and follow with the date of the first certificate that came through.

How big is "a useful size"? It really depends. I've seen it done several ways.

In general, there are two competing pressures at play in determining the right size for an entity to serve as the scope of certification.

• On the one hand, you don't want the scope too narrow, or you'll have to pay for too many audits. In other words, if three offices that are all in the same city all do exactly the same kind of work, you can save some money by letting them share a certificate. You pay for less overhead at the Certifying Body, and you pay for fewer audits (because all three offices are doing the exact same thing). This all looks good on a balance sheet.
• On the other hand, you don't want the scope too broad, because there's always the risk that someone goes crazy one day. If you have a hundred locations all sharing the same certificate, and someone in a tiny office way out in Far Foodle starts violating an important policy, the next auditor might rate it as a Major Nonconformity. Then that Major might put the certificate at risk for all hundred locations!

Where you draw the line while balancing these two imperatives depends a lot on your organizational culture. I've worked for one multi-site operation whose corporate ethos was entrepreneurial, and who had created a number of sites by acquisition. So there was a distinct chance that two sites might not be on the same page. For that company, each site was strictly responsible for its own certifications. The company had a blanket contract with a CB, because they got a volume discount. But inside that blanket contract, we were on our own. I made the arrangements for my location, but not for the others; I worked with the auditor and tracked the findings for my location, but not for the others. We never had a crisis where one location risked losing certification, but the company's management took no chances.

But then later I worked for another company that bundled eight sites across the United States all into one certificate. We supported the same product line, and we were all in the same geographic region. So the company decided that was enough commonality that it made sense for us to share a certificate, and we could sink or swim together. I made the arrangements for eight locations, tracked findings for eight locations, and flew around the country a fair bit to support audits when they happened. 

This meant I carried out eight internal audits a year, but not nearly so many external audits. We had a "matrix certificate," which meant that the CB did a sampling every year: they always audited headquarters, and they always audited our one factory, but then they would pick one or two other sites randomly and leave it at that. Over the years, of course, they ended up visiting every site; but every spring I had a long discussion with their scheduler to agree where they should go. 

"You visited A last year, and you visited B the year before, but you've never audited C. How about seeing them this year?"

"Wait, we've never been to C? What do you even do at that site?"

"It's basically the same work as B, so I don't expect any significant findings. But you haven't been there yet, so it might be good to visit."

"Sure, I guess. How many people work there ...?"       

As long as the processes and systems really are common across locations, this can be a useful way to proceed. Next week I'll say a little more about how matrix certificates work.

       

Communication at Hogwarts

We all know that communication is important, but sometimes we overlook how hard it can be. Of course in formal contexts—and we in the Quality business often focus on those—we rely on written documentation: contracts, product specifications, and the like. But there is also a kind of intangible Quality in the workplace, and no written job description can ever cover all the subtleties of chatting over coffee.

So I was delighted to attend a webinar a couple days ago that articulated the different strategies people use to com­mu­nicate (especially in the workplace), and that suggested ways to make that communication better. The webinar was sponsored by the St. Louis Section of ASQ. The speaker was Tom Brown, of Serve2Lead. And the title was "When Intent Meets Impact: Improving Communication to Strengthen Quality Culture."

The core of Brown's talk was based on the TRACOM® Social Style™ model of human interaction.This model states that each of us naturally gravitates to one of four different modes when we try to communicate, and that over a suffi­ciently large population the four modes are more or less evenly distributed. (To be clear, any of us can use any of the four modes, depending on context. But the model says that one will always feel more natural than the others. An added complication is that when we are put under stress, we shift modes in predictable ways.) The key consequence is that three out of every four people you talk to prefer to communicate differently than you do! If we are not careful, this can make for a lot of misunderstanding.

What are these four modes? They break down along two axes: an assertiveness scale, that stretches between those who prefer to Ask and those who prefer to Tell; and a responsiveness scale that stretches between those who focus on Tasks and those who focus on People. Plotting these two axes on the same page gives us four quadrants, which are the four modes that Brown discussed. For convenience, the model gives them names: Driver, Analytical, Amiable, and Expressive.

Strengths of the four modes

After he explained this table, Brown introduced a fun digression. He asked each of us to rate ourselves on which mode was most natural for us, and then to report back to the group. Even though the modes show up with about equal frequency in a "large-enough" population, our results showed that 57% of the people attending the webinar saw themselves as Analyticals. Brown—who sees himself as an Expressive and whose presentation was consistently enthusiastic, humorous, and energetic—said he wasn't a bit surprised. The webinar was sponsored by ASQ, so he argued that the large number of Quality professionals in attendance must have tipped the balance.*

Of course it's not all roses. Each of these modes has its corresponding weaknesses as well, which frustrate those who communicate in some other way. So, for example, Drivers can be decisive, tough, and efficient—and these are all strengths. But at the same time, they can come across as autocratic, overbearing, and insensitive—and these qualities can, depending on context, impede their ability to get cooperation from their colleagues. A listing of weaknesses looks like this:

Weaknesses of the four modes

What are we supposed to do with this information? In the first place, just be aware of it! Understand how you communicate, and how your listeners communicate as well. Then if there is a mismatch, be aware of how they are likely to misunderstand you, and of how your normal approach is likely to frustrate them. When you see that you are starting to annoy them, redirect yourself in a more productive way. Brown calls this "Moving to the Middle." He says that the key is to do less of whatever it is you normally do too much of, so that you cause less stress for people who communicate in fundamentally different ways.

How to move to the middle

There was much more to the talk, including a lengthy discussion of how someone native to one of the modes will react under stress. It turns out that he shifts to each of the other modes in turn, in a predictable pattern, as the stress continues to mount. But I can't possibly reproduce the whole webinar here, with all of Brown's insights. If this sounds useful to you, there are always sources online. Or drop Brown a note on his website. I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. 

I titled this blog post "Communications at Hogwarts." So what does any of this have to do with Hogwarts?

Hogwarts, as you probably remember, is a private, boarding school for young wizards, created by J. K. Rowling for her Harry Potter series of novels. The students at Hogwarts are sorted into four Houses, based on their personal character, habits, and preferences. The four Houses are Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin, and Wikipedia summarizes their characteristics as follows: "Gryffindor values courage, nerve, and chivalry.... Hufflepuff values hard work, patience, justice, and loyalty.... Ravenclaw values intelligence, learning, wisdom, and wit.... [And] Slytherin values ambition, cunning, leadership, and resourcefulness."

But are these not the very social types we have been discussing? 

• Gryffindors are energetic and visionary, promoters and natural leaders. So are Expressives.
• Hufflepuffs care about justice and loyalty, and about working together for a common achievement. So do Amiables.
• Ravenclaws care about precision and accuracy, clarity and data. So do Analyticals.
• And Slytherins want to win. Just like Drivers.

Of course I don't mean the parallels too seriously. But they may be a handy way to remember the elements of the TRACOM model.

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* I didn't offer a category for myself when he asked us, because I ran out of time through overthinking the question. In retrospect, maybe the fact that I was overthinking it should have given me my first clue. 😀    

      

Can things ever get better?

Does it ever seem to you like things are getting slowly worse all the time? It can't be just me. And last week I finally saw a video that explains why.

It's a joke, of course. The video purports to show us "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator," someone whose job it is to make every product and service a little bit worse. The main character addresses the audience directly, explaining that he inherited his calling from his father before him. And at first he starts off small: cutting holes in the toes of socks, and sawing half an inch off one table leg so that the table rocks. But the Internet allows him to expand his operations. Soon he offers online services for free—just long enough to get users hooked on them—and then incrementally degrades the services to encourage customers to pay for "Premium" status (viz., the same level of service that was free last year). I won't give away the punchline, but the ending is perfectly in line with the dark humor that pervades the rest of the video. It's well worth the four minutes.

Wow, that sounds cynical! Who made it? Some disgruntled undergraduate? 

The "Breaking Free" report

Actually, no. The video was produced by NewsLab, a Norwegian communications agency; but it was commissioned and publicized by Forbrukerrådet, the Norwegian Consumer Council. Their point is to advertise a new report which highlights that this drift towards "enshittification" is a conscious, deliberate policy of the major firms in Big Tech. The report, entitled "BREAKING FREE: Pathways to a fair technological future," spells out the exact steps by which major tech firms hook customers with free or discounted services, and then squeeze them for payment once the cost of leaving the service is too great. Nor do they stop there. Forbrukerrådet winds up the report by identifying a slate of legislative measures to protect consumers from this predatory behavior. And in a logical next step, they and other allied consumer organizations have already sent letters to legislators in Norway, in the European Union, and in the United States urging adoption of these measures.

In case it's not clear in what follows, I wish them well. I agree that life is worse when online services are designed so that you can't easily switch between providers. And it could be interesting to study the slate of concrete measures proposed in the report, to understand how likely they are to achieve their stated goal. If you want me to drill into the details in a future post, please tell me in the comments. What is certain is that even with the best measures, bringing the corporations to heel won't be easy. (Consider the "Alternative to fines" discussion in this post from two years ago.) But what I want to ask right now is a far more basic question. Once the legislators get these letters and read them, what motivation do they have to act on the proposals? What's in it for them?

Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad,
Director of Digital Policy,
Norwegian Consumer Council

I don't know how politics works in Norway, nor at the pan-European levels of the EU. But in the United States, legislators are generally motivated by re-election. They support measures that will get them re-elected, and they oppose measures that would prevent their re-election. The Big Tech firms contribute generously to the campaign funds of legislators who are disposed to help them. Who contributes to their opponents? Who is out there in the public square, capitalizing on the attention earned by this funny video, mobilizing voters to throw out the rascals who protect Big Tech and to replace them with insurgents defending the Common Man? Can you think of a name? Anyone?       

Because without such mobilization, I think the measures are going nowhere. If legislators are motivated by re-election, then the surest way to make progress on this topic is to convince those legislators that supporting consumers against the depradations of Big Tech is essential to getting re-elected. It might be possible to make such an argument some day, with enough organization. But up till now I have not heard it made.

Maybe it sounds like I'm ranting, or preaching cheap gloom-and-doom. But I'm not. There's an important Quality lesson here, one that applies to every improvement project you undertake—in the office, on the shop floor, or anywhere. The point is this: 

• Every improvement project requires someone in authority to say, "Do it."
• Therefore, every improvement has to look good to the person who authorizes it.
• This means that no matter how much benefit the improvement might bring, it won't happen unless you can persuade the person in authority that he or she is better off approving the project than rejecting it. At some level, there has got to be something in it for him or her.   

Often that "something" is just that your improvement will make things run smoother in the office or on the shop floor, and naturally the boss wants things to run smoother. That might be enough. In other cases, you might have to be a little more persuasive. But the point is that there has to be something. And my biggest concern about the package of reforms that the Forbrukerrådet has proposed to protect common consumers against Big Tech is that these measures benefit everyone except the tech executives themselves and the legislators who have to pass the laws. 

      

Egg cartons

Last week I talked about preventive actions in general, and remarked that you have to make sure you are solving the right problem. But of course there are other requirements too, in order for a preventive action to be really effective. It should be (for example) simple, inexpensive, and easy to replicate at scale. So I thought it would be fun to take a minute to look at one of the most successful preventive actions of our time, an invention so ubiquitous that it can be hard to remember the problem it was designed to solve.

Consider the egg carton.

The modern egg carton was invented in 1911 by Joseph Coyle, a newspaperman in British Columbia, after overhearing an argument between a hotel owner and a deliveryman over an order of eggs that had arrived broken.

"[Coyle] said there's got to be a better way. And … well, the rest is history," Fergus Tomlin, director of the Bulkley Valley Museum, said in an interview.

The modern egg carton is an ingenious device—so ingenious that it becomes easy to think of it as an obvious tool or a fact of nature, rather than a preventive measure created by human intelligence to solve a problem. But a moment's reflection reveals some interesting questions. Among these:

Eggs have been fragile as long as people have been eating them; so why did it take until 1911 for someone to invent a protective container to carry them in?

What was it about Coyle's design that made it universally adopted?

For the first question, I think there are two answers. Over the long term, it is only comparatively recently that we have developed economic markets large enough that the fragility of eggs carried to market could be treated as one large problem rather than as hundreds of small, individual problems. And if anyone did happen to develop an egg carton back in the Middle Ages, he never wrote it down in any document that has survived—so the idea died with him. By the dawn of the twentieth century, by contrast, we had national markets and a patent system to spread innovations.

The second answer is that other people before Coyle did come up with solutions to the problem, but their solutions simply weren't as good! There were wooden crates designed to carry eggs in quantity, but they were large and bulky. At best, they were suited to large commercial transactions, but they were too cumbersome for anyone who wanted to by a simple dozen.

This brings us the the second question: What was it about Coyle's design that made it universally adopted? And I think I anticipated the answers in my introduction above.

Coyle's design was simple: The whole carton is one part. There are no interior slats to insert and align, in order to keep the eggs in place.

Coyle's design was inexpensive: His egg cartons were made of cardboard or paper pulp, not wood.

Coyle's design was easy to replicate at scale: Ironically, this is why Coyle never became a millionaire. Other people took his simple design, made this or that minor improvement, and then patented the result. In a brief Google search I found four different US patents for variant egg cartons; it would not surprise me if there are more.

US patent 1269394, to Joseph Coyle        

US patent 1543443 to Morris Koppelman

US patent 1975129 to Francis H. Sherman

US patent 3458108 to Walter H Howarth, Gerald A Snow, and Harold A Doughty

At a personal level, this outcome may be disappointing. Years later, in an interview, Coyle's daughter said, "As is so often the case with inventors, he was no match for the sharp practices of big business and their sharper lawyers. The Coyle carton made several millionaires but dad was not one of them. We lived comfortably, but not affluently."

But from a Quality perspective, in a sense this is the best possible outcome. Innovations should be spread, picked up, adapted, improved-upon, and then those improvements should be passed along in their turn. We learn from others, and then others in their turn learn from us. The Quality goal is to solve problems as well as possible. And the problem of carrying eggs without breaking them was solved—almost (if not quite) as well as possible—by Joseph Coyle in 1911. 

           

Gatekeeping

Last week I wrote a post for this blog, and—as usual—tried to publicize it in LinkedIn. But I mostly failed. My very first post about the article (in my own timeline) went through well enough; but when I tried to cross post in special-interest groups, I invariably got the message, "Oops - we were unable to complete your request. Please try again later." And "trying again later" produced the same result. It was odd.

LinkedIn Customer Support has hitherto offered a number of theories for what happened, none of which match the facts of the case. (Perhaps I explained the problem in a confusing way at first; but as we have emailed back and forth, I have tried to make the picture clearer.) But I have been able to post other notifications since then. So it is clear to me that my account has not been blocked, and I have not violated some overall limit on the number of posts. As far as I can tell, the only plausible explanation left is that my post triggered a content filter. The filter must have determined my post to be spam, not because there were too many copies of it (There weren't.) but somehow because of what I said. In other words, I must have run afoul of some gatekeeping protocol.     

Gatekeeping isn't necessarily a bad thing, though in this case it proved inconvenient for me. In essence, gatekeeping is a form of preventive action. For example, many large companies have policies that require all their suppliers to be certified to ISO 9001. This is a gatekeeping requirement, and it is intended to weed out certain problems before they start. We have discussed at length that certification to ISO 9001 doesn't necessarily mean a company does good work. But it does mean that they have a way to handle complaints, and it does mean that they will work next week more or less the same way they worked this week. Those two reassurances—just by themselves—are huge. 

By the same token, if you determine that a certain sort of message interferes with the purposes of your online community, it's only natural to take action in advance to prevent that kind of message from ever being posted. I assume that the LinkedIn filters probably thought my post was some kind of advertisement—maybe even an advertisement for some kind of artificial intelligence tool. While advertising is allowed on LinkedIn, it has to go through a certain procedure before it is posted. It would not surprise me to learn that LinkedIn has tools—maybe even AI tools, ironically—that screen individual posts to look for advertisements that have been disguised as personal notifications. It wouldn't even surprise me if someone showed me a list of the features that this tool looks for, the features that identify a probable advertisement-in-hiding, and it turned out that by a simple accident I had written some of those features into my post—so that the gatekeeping tool rejected it.

It wouldn't surprise me. But at this point that's pure speculation. I have seen no such list yet, and LinkedIn Customer Service has not confirmed that this is the problem. I am just guessing.

But let's take this line of thought one step farther. We all know that if you are going to derive preventive actions or lessons learned from a problem investigation, the actions or the lessons have to be based in some kind of causal way on the things you learned during the investigation. In the same way, if you decide to gatekeep your social media community to keep out AI-based advertising (or whatever it turns out to be), you should make sure that this is what you are really doing in practice. Look at your algorithm closely, and review it from time to time. Also, if someone's posts get caught by the algorithm and he complains, that might mean he's a human being (rather than an AI) so you might be able to use that information to refine your algorithm even more. 

Meanwhile I'll try to write notifications that don't sound like ad copy. That's a preventive action on my part, to avoid this circumstance arising again.   

           

Training systems and artificial intelligence

A few days ago, I got a message from a man named Momchil Penev, asking what I think about training systems and their vulnerabilities? It was an interesting question, and I had to tell him that I haven't thought about the subject in depth. Then he had a few more questions, and we started a conversation that I'll explain in some detail below. But in the meantime I started to wonder ... why haven't I spent more time thinking about training systems?

How important is training, really?

We all know that training is important to Quality: if people don't know how to do a job, they can't be expected to do it well. It even shows up in ISO 9001—clause 7.2 (c) says explicitly that if your people don't already know how to do the work, you have to make sure they learn. But as an auditor, I've never found that checking training records contributes a lot to the overall outcome of the audit, other than by checking the box for clause 7.2. If I'm going to find problems in the organization, it seems like they are always somewhere else.

But why? I think there are three reasons:

• Training records usually consist of a list of classes (for office staff) or a list of operations (for manufacturing and logistics personnel), each one signed off by a supervisor or instructor. Often there is no indication what the signature actually means, so all I can check is whether the paperwork is complete. (Remember this point, because we'll come back to it.)
• Most of the organizations I've audited are fairly small, or else they are small units inside large companies. It's hard for incompetence to hide in small companies, because people largely know what their neighbors are working on. I've been more likely to find that an employee's training record shows no signature for a skill that he knows very well, than to find a true gap in some mission-critical competency.
• On the whole, when people fail to follow established procedures, I haven't found that ignorance is the root cause. There's always something else going on. At least in my experience, the employees who take shortcuts that end in disaster know what they are supposed to do, but they choose not to do it.   

Sometimes training is not the problem!

This last point is important. Remember Alaska Airlines flight 1282, that lost a door plug shortly after takeoff on January 5, 2024? The best explanation I've ever read of the root causes behind this accident comes from an anonymous account posted to the Internet by a current Boeing employee. You can find it here. 

• This account makes the point that the door plug blew out because four bolts to hold it in place were missing.
• The bolts were missing because they had been removed in order to fix a different problem with the door plug.
• Then after that problem was fixed the bolts were never replaced because the workers forgot about them. 
• But if they had followed the established repair procedures they could not have forgotten. The only way they could possibly forget was by taking shortcuts.
• Why did they take a shortcut? Not because they were ignorant of the correct procedure, but because the procedure was too cumbersome and time-consuming. And they were already under pressure from management to hurry up.

Or consider a story that I tell in this post from a few years ago. In a factory that I represented, an external auditor wrote up one of our manufacturing personnel because he was running a plating bath and the liquid was at the wrong temperature. The procedure told him that if anything was wrong he should shut down the line and call the responsible manufacturing engineer (who was on vacation at the time). But in fact this employee had decades of experience with plating. He knew that he could compensate for the wrong temperature by making minor changes to the chemical mix in the bath. The end product was indistinguishable from one made according to the instructions, and this way we could ship it to the customer on time rather than delaying the order two weeks until the engineer returned. We got an audit finding, but from the customer's perspective his solution was perfect.* In this case, the reason the employee failed to follow the written procedure was that he was confronting an unforeseen situation, and had the deep knowledge to improvise a solution.

This is why I say that in my experience, ignorance of a procedure hasn't generally been the root cause of failure to comply. By the same token, when I am coaching a team through an 8D report to resolve some failure, I don't accept "Retrain employees" as a corrective action. There has got to be something more substantive behind the problem.  

But training systems can still be more robust

All that having been said, training systems are still necessary. And like anything else, they can always be improved. This brings me back to my conversation with Momchil Penev, who wants to use artificial intelligence technology to improve them.

Penev is the founder of skillia.AI, and his idea is an interesting one. It's a bit of a right-angle turn in our discussion, but let me take a minute to explain what he is doing.

As I say, it's an interesting idea. In general I'm something of an AI-skeptic; and as noted above, training by itself won't solve all Quality problems. But it still has to be done, and the records still have to be up to date! If Penev can find a problem and then solve it, that's how Progress happens. I wish him well. 

POSTSCRIPT: During our conversation, Penev told me that he is eager to get feedback from people in the Quality business about the performance and limitations of his tool. This means you! So while I have no financial stake in Penev's success or failure, I told him I would post his Contact page. You can reach him at https://skillia.ai/contact. Tell him what you think of his ideas, or ask how you can test the tool for free. 

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* For further discussion of this finding, see the referenced post.