What's so bad about Management Review?

Last week I argued that Management Review is the key element of a Quality Management System, because feedback is what turns any phenomenon into a system, and Management Review is the highest and most comprehensive feedback mechanism in the organization.

But Management Review has, to put it gently, a mixed reputation in most businesses. For every Quality practitioner who (like me) insists that it is the heart of things, you can find several who concede grudgingly that yes, it is required; but who also know that most managers in their organizations will do anything to get out of attending.

How can this be? The problem is that there are many ways management reviews can go wrong. If you avoid them, the meetings are engaging and productive, but it's a high-wire act. Slip just a bit, and you miss the target in a big way. As I wrote once in another context, there are many ways to make management reviews boring and over the years (before I finally learned better) I've used most of them.

A couple of years ago, Bill Hackett of QBD Strategies posted a discussion on myASQ that nicely summarized the weaknesses he has most often seen in management reviews. It's a good list, so I'd like to abbreviate it here.

Senior management not present

The whole point of the meeting is to assess whether your QMS is working, and then—in case it's not—to take decisions that will put it back on course. If senior management is missing, you can't take fundamental decisions and the meeting becomes pointless. (The absence of senior management is also a formal failure, because [for example] ISO 9001:2015, clause 9.3.1, defines the whole activity by saying that, "Top management shall review the organization's quality management system, at planned intervals, ...." But next to the pragmatic problem, that's almost beside the point.)

Reviews occurring infrequently

Yup. If the reviews are few and far between, you spend the meeting time rehashing ancient history. The issues were resolved months ago, but here are more slides about the same subjects, just because. Pretty soon people are checking their phones and the meeting is dead.

No established agenda

I don't know how you can hold a meeting without an agenda, but Hackett says he's seen it plenty of times in audits. No agenda increases the chance of missing something important, and it means you can't ask participants to be prepared ahead of time. So how can you get anything done?

Lack of process ownership when reporting

Without a clear owner for each process, you can't tell whose job it is to fix something when it goes off the rails. I talk about process ownership at some length here, and it all applies.

Insufficient or irrelevant information presented

Heavens, yes. When you are close to a problem, you see all the details and you know intimately why they are important. But when you generate your PowerPoint slides to explain the problem to management, it's easy to leave out the parts that you think are "so obvious" you don't have to mention them. Bad news—these points aren't obvious to top management, and you do have to mention them. When you are urgently explaining that "The glitzenhammer has to be refrangulated right away!" and they stare back at you in bafflement, it's a sign you might have left out something important.

Lack of support for management review facilitator

I might phrase this as "lack of support for the management review process," but we mean the same thing. You can't possibly put on the whole meeting yourself. You need the input and cooperation of the functional areas. Also, as Hackett points out, it helps to use templates (so the information is all presented the same way); it helps to collect it all beforehand (so that the presentation is smoother, and so you can check if some of the results look wrong); and so on. Every step of the way you need the support of others.

The good part is that if you can make the meeting run smoothly and productively, then the process owners and functional specialists that you have to rely on will be happy to cooperate. At least that has been my experience. It's almost as if addressing the first five on this list buys you the sixth one for free. Of course, nothing is really free. But addressing these gaps is the first step to creating a dynamic culture for management reviews. It's possible. And it's worth it.