Where do you start?

"Congratulations, and welcome to WhizzBang Corporation! We're so glad you accepted our offer. It's good to have you aboard, and it's great to know you'll be taking over our Quality system. Now that you're hired, let me be completely candid. Things aren't where we want to see them. You'll find there are ... issues. I won't go into the details now. Better you look at it all with fresh eyes. But we know you're talented. Your previous experience is really impressive. So I'm sure you'll have everything shipshape in no time. Just remember, we're all counting on you."

Just what you wanted to hear, huh? You've just now taken over responsibility for a Quality system somewhere. Things are wrong and it's your job to set them right. But you don't actually know what's wrong, and it doesn't look like anybody's going to tell you. Besides, even if someone tells you where he thinks the problem is, how do you know that he's right? Maybe he doesn't see the whole picture. Or maybe the real problem is in his area, and he's trying to deflect your attention. What information can you trust, and what is just shadows in the fog?

Where do you start?

Audits. Start by doing internal system audits.

The thing is, unless you are prepared to tell everyone to scrap everything they are doing today and start over, you need information. But it has to be objective information. Confidential remarks that "Frankly, it's all Fred's fault" aren't good enough. A complete system audit won't catch every single problem, but it should highlight the areas of real concern and give you a good overall map that will let you plan your next steps.

What's more, you know you are going to get pushback when you try to correct things. People will tell you that you just don't understand—this is the way they've always done it, and it has always worked fine. But an audit gives you objective evidence. With that evidence, you can plainly show that the process is supposed to generate one kind of result but in fact it is generating another. It's not working. It has to be corrected.

Where you go next depends on what you find, of course. But start with a review of the whole system's status, backed up by objective evidence. Start with audits, and then go from there.

P.S.: I am assuming in all of this that the management system you work to actually provides for some kind of internal system audits. If your organization is governed by ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, or many others like them, it does. The same is true for most other management systems that I know of. In the unlikely event that you somehow find yourself in a situation where there is no standard provision for internal auditing, implement them anyway in an ad hoc way. If anybody asks, you can always claim that you're doing a gap analysis.    

      

Asking about goals

After a discussion like the one that stretched across the last four posts, maybe we can afford to take a minute for something more light-hearted.

The following conversation really happened, in an audit where I was the company's internal Quality representative, accompanying an external auditor on his interviews.

Parasitic certifications? Part 4, Standards eating the world

My last two posts (here and here) discussed Scotlyn's charge that the proliferation of formal standards actually degrades Quality rather than enhancing it. But that is only half of her argument. Her other major point is that jobs in Quality are parasitic on the productive economy, replacing (and thereby eliminating) jobs that make things or add value, and therefore that the Quality business as a whole will ultimately destroy the economy that it lives on.

How far is this true?

Quality as parasite

In a strictly literal sense, of course, it is absolutely true that Quality is parasitic on productive jobs, in exactly the same way that Management is. Neither Quality nor Management is involved in the creation of value (unlike Design, Manufacturing, Logistics, or Service). Both Quality and Management are involved in the organization and monitoring of other people's work. In that sense, they have a lot in common.* 

So the first answer to the charge that Quality is parasitic should be, "Yes, but is that a problem?" If told that it is, we should pursue the analogy with Management to understand why it is a problem. Scotlyn expresses concern that Quality jobs can push out productive jobs, by consuming the resources that would otherwise have paid for them. In the same way, there are some companies where the members of Management assign themselves a disproportionate share of the proceeds, so that the firms cannot pay their other bills and go belly up. We know this sometimes happens, but nobody thinks that such failures invalidate the general concept of Management. All they prove is that — as a manager — you can't afford to get greedy. While it is possible for Management to ruin the enterprise, the answer is to do a better job of implementing Management, and not to do away with it altogether.

Does the analogy hold? I think it does. I have argued before in support of clerical staff, because they offload important work from people who should really be doing something else. And I propose that the same thing is true of Quality staff. Somehow there is an optimal level of administrative functions (by which I mean management, quality, and clerical work all bundled together) — in other words, a level at which the organization flourishes. With too few people in these functions, the organization trips and falls because there is no infrastructure to clear simple obstacles out of the way;** with too many, the organization chokes on its own bureaucracy and runs out of money by paying too many unproductive salaries. Somewhere in the middle has to be a Goldilocks point where the size of the administrative staff is just right.   

That, then, is what we should do. That is how we should implement Quality systems. And as you may have noticed, that has been the approach I have tried to advocate throughout this blog. But Scotlyn makes one final argument: regardless what we should do, she predicts, in fact "the global standards and certification industry will eventually eat production and the economy, and bring the whole thing to a collapse from too much top-heaviness, and too little bottom sturdiness."

Is she right?

Eating the world

The answer depends partly on the number of new global standards that are written, and partly on the number of industries that make them mandatory. On the first point, I think she may be on the right track; on the second, I am a little more sanguine.

What encourages the proliferation of standards is that there are no known limits on the number of things that can go wrong. And whenever something goes wrong, the easiest solution is to make a rule so that it can't happen again. So I see no obvious reason why the number of global standards — the number of rules — should ever level off, until the day comes when our whole current economic system turns obsolete and is replaced by something else that we can't imagine today.

Of course the problem with reflexive rule-making is that the first time you do it, you look decisive. After the twentieth time, you start to wonder whether you have unintentionally tied yourself in knots.   

Bear in mind, though, that any company which hires too many people into non-productive functions will sooner or later go bust. This is why I say I am more sanguine about the question how many industries will make these standards mandatory. In industries with wide profit margins — like aerospace, aviation, or the high-technology industries generally — we should expect global standards to be ubiquitous, because those industries can afford them. But in other industries, those with narrower profit margins, I think we can expect that standardization will get next to no foothold at all, because none of the firms in those industries can afford to hire the personnel. In other words, after the highly profitable industries are saturated with global standards, I tend to think that the spread of standardization will slow or stop. This may help to postpone the collapse that Scotlyn foresees. 

Thunderous noise

If Scotlyn is right — if the whole system does collapse and "make thunderous noise as it falls" — will that really be a problem?

For those of us with jobs in the Quality industry, it will likely mean unemployment. At a personal level, yes, that generally counts as a problem. But for the rest of the world?

It would be a serious setback to global trade if buyers and sellers stopped using uniform weights and measures, or if the specifications for ball bearings and light-bulb sockets were no longer reliably standard around the world. But those standards are the least likely to be abandoned, for exactly that reason.

It would be nice to think that some acceptable level of safety standards for food and appliances will remain in force internationally, but I don't know enough to make an argument that it's certain. Maybe it's not certain, and — if true — that would be a sad fact.

As for the management system standards, the ones that I know best, these would probably trigger the least immediate harm if they suddenly vanished. (For professional reasons, naturally I wish I could say otherwise. But no such luck.) In that sense, they are probably the most optional of the lot. If the global system of standardization collapses, the best case for the management system standards is if they remain as guidelines to best practices for managing organizations. That way, at least they could still benefit organizations who chose to implement them, even if external certification were no longer available or meaningful.

Summary

Where does this leave us? Let me summarize briefly the main points of Scotlyn's argument, and my replies to each, in order:

• "The relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional."
• It is certainly non-deterministic.
• "The standards will never be the products, nor ever be able to satisfactorily describe them."
• True.
• "It follows that the more standards, the less quality. Standardisation is, in fact, an essential component of the “crapification of things."
• Not so fast. Some level of standardization has its place — e.g., for critical health and safety aspects.
• Also the management system standards are valuable guidelines to good basic business practices.
• But yes, there is certainly a risk that too much standardization can undermine product quality.
• "The relationship between certified standards and the actual economy is parasitic, ...." 
• True. Just like management, no more and no less.
• "... in that the more jobs that are created to certify, to inspect, to manage, to comply, to produce documentation ..., the more that productive jobs ... are destroyed."
• Yes, all true. 
• But some non-zero number of administrative and Quality jobs are needed to allow the organization to function. 
• The key is to find the magic Goldilocks number, and the great trick is never to exceed it.
• "The global standards and certification industry will eventually eat production and the economy, and bring the whole thing to a collapse from too much top-heaviness, and too little bottom sturdiness."
• There are forces pushing in this direction, and others pushing against it. I don't know which forces will win. But you might be right.
• "Out of which, small, light, and fast non-compliant producers and purveyors who can stay below the radar and out of the limelight, will emerge and begin to create whatever comes next."
• From your lips to the ears of Heaven. 

Answering Scotlyn's remarks has been my longest single exercise of analysis and exposition since I started this blog, and I thank her — deeply and sincerely — for pushing me to do it. At the same time, I am well aware that other readers might disagree with some (or all!) of what I have written here. As always, please add your comments so we can make this a living discussion. The only way we can achieve continual improvement in our theory and practice of the Quality business is to talk to each other.

As always, let's talk.             

__________

* As an aside, I note that I've heard complaints about the uselessness of Quality far more often than I have heard the equivalent complaints about Management. I'm not sure why.   

** In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams characterizes this extreme as the point at which the entire Golgafrinchan population dies off from an infectious disease contracted from an "unexpectedly dirty" telephone.

        

Parasitic certifications? Part 3, Certified systems vs. quality

Just as a reminder, I am still discussing a broad-based critique of Quality standards and certifications from Scotlyn, a reader whose fundamental challenge you can find here. 

Scotlyn began by arguing that "the relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional," and that "it follows that the more standards, the less quality." Last week I discussed whether and how far I can support this critique with respect to product standards. In what follows below, I address management system standards.

How far the charge is true

When we turn to management system standards, it is certainly true that certification to a quality management standard like ISO 9001 does not guarantee all your products are good. Just following the right rules won't give you Quality.

In the same way, it is perfectly possible for a company to turn out excellent work, on a reliable and repeatable basis, without ISO 9001 certification. I once worked for a small regional outpost of a huge, global company. One of our regular suppliers — a firm we had worked with for years — was not certified to ISO 9001. Our global headquarters issued a directive that no company could be rated as a Preferred Supplier unless it met a variety of criteria, including certification. At first our local Purchasing Manager tried to protest that this was the only supplier from whom we had never had a major problem — and even when there were minor issues they were always perfectly responsive. Headquarters was unmoved; the regulation had to be implemented worldwide, with no exceptions. So our local Purchasing Manager dutifully categorized this supplier as "Non-Preferred," and then went right on ordering from them exactly as before. I joked that we should have a special category for "Non-Preferred Suppliers That We Like a Lot."

But I almost think this supplier counts as a special case, rather than a simple counterexample against ISO 9001. It was obvious to anyone who did business with them why their work was so consistently excellent. This was a family firm owned by a man who had put everything into it, and who identified with it totally. He was personally committed to flawless workmanship, most of the employees were relatives, and nobody was willing to let down the family. It was a powerful combination, but not one that many companies are in a position to imitate.

This is one reason, though, that I have spent some of my time in this blog posting about topics like employee engagement, competence and attitude. While management systems are important, no system can do all the work by itself. So I have been happy to highlight the work of specialists like Jeff Griffiths, Dawn Ringrose, and Angie Alexander, who study and teach ways to encourage that personal connection between the people doing the work and the felt desire to do it right.

That said, this forum is primarily about Quality systems. And I'm not prepared to write them off yet.

In what ways the charge is false

In the first place, most of the requirements of a standard like ISO 9001 are little more than formalized common sense. With a standard or without it, companies that don't keep meeting minutes or do design reviews will have trouble sooner or later. And while it catches our attention when we see an uncertified company doing flawless work or a certified company shipping garbage, the times that quality and certification align are less striking — precisely because they are more expected — and therefore harder to see. But we have to take account of that side of the ledger as well.

I've worked in startups where there are no systems in place. They are energetic and creative places; the ones where I worked made solid and useful products. And normally everyone got along fine without a lot of system overhead. But when something went wrong, nobody knew how to react; when an unexpected bug brought one of our software products crashing to the ground, nobody knew where to find it, because the code wasn't modular and there had been no unit testing. I don't say that ISO 9001 by itself made all our problems go away. But the introduction of some kind of system was key to making them more manageable. And ISO 9001 is a perfectly decent framework for the kind of system I mean. (Note that ISO 9001 is only a framework. You still have to design your own system for yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. But ISO 9001 tells you what kind of shape it should have when you are done.)

Another story

Here's another example, and maybe a deeper or richer one. Recently I was talking with a woman who owns a small, local business that fills a very specialized niche. In her line of work, certification is now effectively mandatory: if you aren't certified, you have no customers. But it wasn't always so, and she has been in business long enough to remember the changeover. She told me that when certification became available — and then mandatory — it was a huge help to her because it enabled her to require a wide range of good practices that she had wanted for a long time but had been unable to implement effectively. Suddenly she didn't need to listen to any Good Reasons™ from her employees about why this or that practice would never work; her answer to all of them was, It has to be done by the time the auditor gets here, or we fail the audit and go out of business. Discussion closed. Then as she continued to reminisce, she casually mentioned that before certification became a requirement she knew of 250 small companies just like hers doing the exact same kind of work; then, as certification became mandatory, the owners of 100 of them decided that the burden imposed by certification was too much for them in either time or money, so they closed their doors. When the dust cleared, a field of 250 small businesses had shrunk to 150, a loss of 40%.

The reason that I call this example deeper or richer than the first one is that it makes two points very clearly.

On the one hand, the imposition of a Quality system has to potential to improve a business in a meaningful way. Potential to improve. No Quality system will ever guarantee that a company becomes good; but it can in any event make the company better than it was before. And sometimes that's a great achievement anyway. Moreover, as always, the standard does nothing by itself; it does nothing without the engagement and support of the people using it. The value comes when the systematic approach required by the standard becomes second nature, when it is fully incorporated into a company's way of working. If some company just wants to game the system so that they can get a certificate without having to change, they might be able to get away with it for a little while (probably not forever). There is no system in the world that cannot be gamed. But that fact is less a reflection on the standard and more a qualification of what the certificate means.   

On the other hand, nothing in life is free. Implementing and maintaining a Quality system requires effort. That effort costs money, because you have to pay somebody to do it; and it costs time, because that person can't do something else while working on this. You surely can't ask your existing staff to implement a Quality system on top of their regular jobs without affecting their productivity. 

This last point is entirely valid. It is important. And it leads us directly into Scotlyn's next charge, which I will take up next week.