What should you LEAVE OUT of Management Review?

Last week we asked why Management Review gets such bad press. While the activity is fundamental to any Quality Management System, many people in many organizations will do seemingly anything to get out of it. And I summarized the points of a discussion by Bill Hackett of QBD Strategies that listed several common failings. But there is one that didn't make Bill's list, and I think it is important enough to give it a post of its own.

You don't have to report everything you know. Let me explain what I mean.

The ISO 9001:2015 standard identifies in clause 9.3.2 a long list of mandatory topics, issues that have to be considered during management review. You know the list as well as I do, right? Status of actions from previous reviews; changes in internal and external issues; trends in customer satisfaction; quality objectives; process performance; product conformance ... I'm not even halfway through the list yet. It goes on and on.

And many organizations, in order to make things simple for their auditors, use this list verbatim as an agenda for their management review meetings. That way the auditors can quickly check that yes indeed, the organization really did consider all these topics. And to be fair, the list truly is comprehensive. Reviewing all those topics really does ensure that you have gotten a systematic look at your QMS.

Image by Magnet.me from Pixabay

The problem is that it is also mind-numbingly dull. And it is totally unnecessary.

Wait, what? That list comes from the standard. How can it be unnecessary?

Simple. The standard never says that you have to report on all these issues. All it says is that "The management review shall be planned and carried out taking into consideration ... [blah, blah, blah]."

What does that mean?

Well to start with, you have to know where each of these issues actually stands. Is it green or red? On-track or off? So when you are preparing the meeting, you still have to do all the same work you do today.

More than that, you have to check: if a metric is red, or if some process is off-track, is it already being handled in the normal course of business? Did your existing systems already pick up the deviation and address it? Again, make sure you know the status of every single point. 

Collect all this data and file it somewhere as the background to the meeting. That way you can show it to your auditor to prove that yes, you really did "take into consideration" each of the required topics.

But when you plan the actual meeting itself, don't waste your time reporting any metric that's green, and don't waste your time explaining any deviation that's already been handled by your regular business operations. You should have the data at your fingertips, of course. If anybody asks about it, you should be able to answer the question with a single mouse click. And if any of that data shows disturbing trends (that haven't been handled yet), naturally you want to bring those trends forward to discuss them.

But the only topics you should plan to address during your management review meeting are topics that cannot be handled anywhere else: topics that are going badly, and that require the intervention of senior management to set them right. 

Yes, you have to "take into consideration" the entire scope of your QMS, to make sure you don't miss something. But there is no law that says you have to give valuable meeting time to things that are going fine. Focus where it hurts.

This way the meetings are shorter, and each topic has an urgency. That makes each topic meaningful. Your attendees will care, and they will listen. It's better this way.