The key to your management system

A few weeks ago, Etienne Nichols of Greenlight Guru posted a question on LinkedIn:

"What is the most important part of a Quality Management System?"  

He listed several candidates:

• Purchasing?
• Quality Policy?
• Customer Focus?
• Design & Development?
• Management Responsibility?
• Documentation and Traceability?
• Corrective Action / Preventive Action (CAPA)?

It will surprise none of you that I disagreed with all of these choices. Here's what I told him.

Management Review. No question.

Of course the reality is that they are all important, like [your other respondents] have already said. But the other reality is that you'll never get it right the first time around, no matter what. So it's critical that you have a mechanism for evaluating what went wrong, and then assigning actions to make it better.

Most management systems have several of these mechanisms, at different levels and with different frequencies of recurrence. But Management Review is (so to speak) the master evaluative mechanism, that incorporates all the others. Therefore Management Review is ultimately what makes the difference between just having a heap of rules and having a true management system.

That prompted a bit of a discussion. Among other things, he asked me how often a startup should schedule Management Review for maximum effectiveness. I answered:

Goodness, there's probably no one-size-fits-all answer. And it depends what you have in mind.

There will be some things you try to implement, and on the first day it becomes obvious you missed something important. If that happens, and you can see how to patch it so it's functional again, don't wait. At the same time you don't want to second-guess yourself every single week.

I'd probably settle on suggesting that you schedule a regular Management Review once a quarter: that gives you long enough to make progress on (for example) the risks and opportunities you've identified as part of the Context of your organization, but it's not so long that you waste time reviewing ancient history. (Holding these reviews once a year is WAY too infrequent.) 

Of course, if you hold them that often you also have to optimize the meeting so that it takes not one minute longer than you really need. There are ways to do this, but they all take a lot of focus. 

If you're looking for more opinions, I could talk for hours. 😀 

That last sentence, too, should surprise none of you.