It's the little things

One of the things that can make the whole ISO 9001 effort feel dispiriting is that the things we auditors ask for seem so small. The company is making fundamental breakthroughs in neural networks or quantum computing, and we ask for training records. Or the company has just perfected the self-driving car, and we ask for meeting minutes. When some company – maybe next year – finally releases the transporter technology from Star Trek, we'll ask for signed attendance lists from all the design reviews. And so on. It can feel like there is a disproportion between the (perhaps) heroic work being done and the (often) mundane work products that we have to check in an audit. And of course that disproportion contributes to the spread of more jokes and cartoons about ISO 9001.

The point is, all these things matter, or they can. It's not always easy to see why. But sometimes you just can't miss it.

Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, there was a company that set some very aggressive goals one year and missed them all by miles. At the end of the year there was a big Town Hall meeting of the whole company to go over the results, and the Big Boss explained how poorly they'd performed. One of the senior employees asked, "How are we changing the targets next year, to make them achievable?"

The Big Boss replied, "We're not changing anything. The targets we missed this year are the ones we'll try to hit next year."

The employee pushed back, asking, "If you do the same thing as before and expect different results, isn't that supposed to be the definition of insanity?"

The Big Boss smiled and said, "But we're not going to do the same things. Next year we are going to keep meeting minutes." 

Then he explained what had gone wrong. All year long the Senior Management Team held meetings to review the company's strategy, and everyone left the meetings thinking that everyone else was responsible for doing the work to get there. So nobody in senior management did anything useful all year, and – since nobody was steering – the company drove into a tree.

The whole difference between success and failure came down to meeting minutes. For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost.

That's why we ask about these little things. Yes, the whole point of the QMS is to get us what we want. Yes, the first question to ask about any artifact should be whether we need it in the Real World, even in the absence of ISO 9001. But often we do. Often it's the little things that make the difference.

          

"One big honkin' binder"

 I'm pretty sure that the casual understanding of ISO 9001 on the part of most non-specialists across the business world is summed up by Scott Adams in his multiple Dilbert cartoons about the subject. Back in the early years of the standard someone tried to summarize the ISO 9001 standard by saying, "Document what you do, and then do what you documented." No doubt the original intention was de-mystify the standard, to show how close it came to basic common sense. But the consequence of this slogan was that everyone focused on documentation. The word went out that ISO 9001 was about documentation. If you have to implement ISO 9001, your first step should be to document everything!

If I had to pick two cartoons that exemplified this point of view, it would be the following. (I'm not sure of the exact limits of fair use, so I will post only links to the cartoons and not copies of them.) The first one shows Dilbert explaining how all the company's ISO 9001 documentation will be collected in "one big honkin' binder." The second shows someone labeling everything because he thinks it's a requirement.

Of course the real requirement says no such thing. In fact, the 2015 edition of the ISO 9001 standard removed all requirements for specific documents. But let me draw a distinction. There are still plenty of requirements that you write things down; what no longer exists is a requirement that you specifically write a Quality Manual, or a documented procedure for records control. Instead of focusing on specific document titles and formats, the requirements now say – in effect – "If you need to write it down, write it down." And then there are a lot of specific paragraphs where they remind you that if your business involves doing this or that, … that's something you need to write down.

So when someone asks me, "Does ISO 9001 require me to document X?" my first step is not to check the standard. My first step is to ask back, "I don't know … would you need to document it in the Real World, even if there were no such thing as ISO 9001?" Nine times out of ten, the answer is, "Yeah, I guess so. Never mind." Then in the rare case where the answer is "No," we can talk about it a little more, check our local company directives, and – yes – look at the standard. But invariably, if the rules finally say "Document it," there's a reason why.

Now that I've made this point – I mean, that ISO 9001 doesn't require you to document everything blindly – maybe it is worth talking in a little more detail about some of the kinds of documentation that auditors often ask for, and why they matter.