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.
Hello! I am coming to this discussion a bit late, but I have personally experienced standards and formal third-party surveys to be helpful. I am a registered nurse who worked on an oncology unit in an acute care hospital for many years and who more recently worked in hospice.
ReplyDeleteLike anyone who works in healthcare, I found documentation requirements to be time-consuming and burdensome, taking precious time away from patient care, and I considered accreditation surveyors to be intimidating and also burdensome. But a few years into my nursing career, I had an experience that proved to me how valuable externally set standards and surveys can be.
This is what happened… As an oncology nurse, I became passionate about quality pain control for the patients I cared for. I studied for and attained Pain Management Nurse Certification. I helped develop a Pain Management Resource Nurse program to raise pain management practice in my hospital. We worked for nearly two years, providing education, doing chart checks, etc, with no improvement in practice. It was discouraging. Then we went through a Joint Commission accreditation survey which resulted in a directive to implement “Pain as the Fifth Vital Sign” and to comply with Joint Commission standards for pain management. Overnight, that changed everything in my hospital and within six months pain management practice had improved exponentially. What we could not do alone, despite tremendous efforts, the Joint Commission helped us do overnight. Since then, I have considered the Joint Commission to be my friend and I experience working with surveyors as a collaborative effort to ensure safety and improve the quality of care we provide.
Thank you, Debra, for this example. Yes, I agree that there are times the accreditation process is exactly what it takes to implement good practices. The picture is a lot more complicated than Scotlyn initially suggested. From my point of view the trick is to *ensure* that the certification process adds value in precisely the way you describe. Thank you again for providing this level of detail.
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