A few days ago I was browsing through LinkedIn, and I found a link to a video called "3 Signs Your Management System Is Just for Show." Well the title was intriguing, so I watched it; and it was three minutes well-spent. The information won't be new to regular readers of this blog, but it's expressed in compact points that any viewer can easily digest and carry away.*
The basic message of the whole video is that your management system shouldn't be something special that you have to think about. It should just be The Way You Do Things. Did you get a customer complaint from the field? Open an 8D, because that's how you handle customer complaints. Are you making a big change to your manufacturing process? Schedule an FMEA, because that's how you evaluate the risks in production changes. Does someone have an idea for a cool new product? Call together a project team, because that's how you develop new products. The place you want to get to is one where you don't have to wonder, "What does our process say we're supposed to do?" or "What does the ISO standard require?" because you just know that this is how we do things here.
The video makes this message more precise by calling out three specific red flags:
- Senior management does not know what is happening with the management system.
- Audits are performed solely to maintain certification.
- The team does not know what the management system is for.
These are concrete points you can look for. But in essence they all mean that you aren't really living your management system.
If senior management doesn't know what is happening with the management system, it means they haven't been showing up for Management Review. But Management Review is the key to the whole organization, the place where you make system-level interventions so that the day-to-day work can move forward by routine without requiring senior management to fire-fight every little issue.
If an organization treats audits as no more than an emergency interruption to ensure certification, they won't get the real benefits of the audit program. We've discussed at length that audits shouldn't require you to do anything different from what you normally do every day. And experience with an audit program can help grow a Quality mindset.
And if a team doesn't even know what the management system is for, ... well, they can't be living it, can they? And the system won't do anyone any good if it just sits on the shelf gathering dust.
As I say, the lessons from this video aren't going to be new or shocking to regular readers. But I do like how they presented it all in such a compact way. I hope you do too.
__________
* The video was produced by an organization called QMS Certification. I've never heard of them before, and know nothing about them. So this post does not constitute any kind of commercial endorsement of their services. But I liked the video.
