Know Your Role

ISO 9001:2008 requires organizations to identify their quality management system (QMS) processes and interactions. The resources to operate, control, monitor, measure and continually improve those processes must be identified.

Too often, processes are well defined, documented and run for years without any real improvement or change. Today, however, change is all around us. When an organization has stale QMS processes in the face of dynamic—at times chaotic—uncertainty, the entire system may become irrelevant.

Certainly, the processes will lose their competitive edge over time. One reason this happens is a manager’s failure to fully appreciate the role of people who work in the processes.

Clause 0.2 of ISO 9000:2005 provides eight quality management principles. These principles were used as key inputs during the development of the ISO 9001:2000 requirements and have been retained as a major underpinning of ISO 9001:2008. Each of the eight had a different influence on the requirements, but the principle most directly reflected in the requirements is process approach.

On approach
The process approach principle states that, "A desired result is achieved more efficiently when activities and related resources are managed as a process." Used properly, the process approach can lead to quality excellence. The key word is "managed."

Often, organizations use flowcharts to understand the processes but sometimes don’t define how they’re managed, controlled, monitored, measured and improved. Flowcharts alone don’t do all of these things.

Processes are the way things get done. They are the way transformations take place to add value. They are also the way things are kept the same—meaning stabilized, controlled and made consistent. Process management is the first prerequisite to reducing variation. When it is used right, process management can be a big contributor to improved quality and productivity.

Another of the eight quality management principles deals with the overall system. According to the system approach to management, "Identifying, understanding and managing interrelated processes as a system contributes to the organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its objectives."

In other words, the overall management system should contribute more value to the organization than the collection of individual processes.

People power
So, we’ve established that processes and process management are important. Some people might argue that managing processes is the most important thing managers do. Well, they’re wrong.

Are the processes more important than people? Ultimately, the organization is nothing but processes and their associated resources. And people are one of those resources. That makes the people sound rather unimportant.

But should you expect your organization’s leaders to fully define the processes and think of the people who work in the process as just another resource? Is managing processes more important than leading people? I don’t think so. After all, it’s people who create, monitor, measure, control and improve the processes of the organization. The people involved in this are at all levels. They do it as individuals, team members and leaders.

Processes are certainly important, but it is the people who make them work. They can make them work well, or they can make them work poorly. If this is true, it becomes critical to get the people who work in the process fully engaged in their work and to involve them in the process management activities for improvement.

It is the people who work with the processes every day who are best able to manage them. Involving these people in process development, understanding, measurement and improvement is a key to successful process management.

Those who work in the process talk to the process customers to identify the process outputs, reach agreements on how to measure them and set targets for those outputs. They also should talk to the suppliers of the process to define what the process needs in terms of inputs, determine how these inputs should be measured and set targets for them.

There is an old saying: "Workers work in the process, and managers work on the process." This attitude needs to change. Often, it’s the people working most closely with the process who can do the best job of analyzing process activities to find duplicative or nonvalue-adding activities that can be combined or eliminated. In other words, they can be great at eliminating waste.

So if working on the processes should be the job of those who operate the processes, what do the managers do? To answer this, let’s return to clause 0.2 of ISO 9000:2005 and look at two more quality management principles.

Leading by example
According to the leadership principle, "Leaders establish unity of purpose and direction of the organization. They should create and maintain the internal environment in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization’s objectives."

It is the job of managers to create the environment in which everyone can be fully engaged in the work and improve the organization’s performance. According to the involvement of people principle, "People at all levels are the essence of an organization, and their full involvement enables their abilities to be used for the organization’s benefit."

Good leaders encourage participation and innovation. They must listen and consider innovative new ideas. They must ensure good ideas are developed into process changes that improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Top management involvement is critical to successfully implementing QMS standards such as ISO 9001:2008. Top managers have important actions they cannot fully delegate. Some of them required by ISO 9001:2008 include:

- Communicating the importance of meeting customer, statutory or regulatory requirements.
- Establishing a quality policy and objectives.
- Conducting management reviews.
- Ensuring the availability of necessary resources.
- Ensuring customer requirements are established and designed to enhance customer satisfaction.

All of this takes time and skillful leadership on the part of managers. Many managers are more comfortable doing the actual improvement work themselves. Solving problems and making improvements is the fun part of their jobs.

Today, senior managers no longer have time to solve all the problems, so the key has become leadership that is focused on involving everyone. Managers need to realize it is even more fun to see their team members successfully implement real innovative changes that make the business better.

It’s people at all levels who make all the difference. Quality professionals need to encourage participation from their top managers when it is essential.

Take responsibility
Before you complain that top management isn’t fully engaged in the quality process of the organization, you should ask yourself if you’re doing your part all of the time, every day of the year to motivate them.

Take action by integrating quality management with other processes. Work toward having one system to set goals and another to review performance. Get involved in strategic planning.

Emphasize process performance rather than policies, documentation and procedures that give the appearance of building bureaucracy for its own sake. Instead, focus on improving process performance to achieve results that are valued by customers.

Documentation is important, but an emphasis on achieving planned results sends a more valuable message.

Most important of all, learn to speak the language of management. Always talk about the financial aspects of anything you discuss with them. Don’t rely on executives to understand quality jargon; present quality in terms they’ll clearly understand.

Constantly remind them that good, customer-focused quality drives revenue up and costs down. Emphasize the point with real examples from your organization, presented with monetary data. When you ask top managers to spend their time on quality, make sure they know the financial effect for the organization.

To fully engage everyone, organizations must begin to consider how they will align their workforces, as well as top and middle managers. This involves taking action on four fronts:

1. Sharing information. Organizations must share not only their objectives, but also the information, measures and data needed to recognize opportunities and carry out improvement projects.

2. Changing expectations. Organizations must make it clear their expectations have changed. It’s no longer sufficient for everyone to do their jobs; they must also learn how to improve it.

3. Managing boundaries. Organizations must set the boundaries of action for all department levels. Although companies should encourage every individual who draws a paycheck to be innovative and make improvements, they don’t want to foster chaos.

4. Providing a supportive environment. Top and middle managers must start behaving in ways that encourage input from everyone. They must understand how to gain the trust of their employees.

These ideas might seem obvious. And it might seem obvious that organizational objectives should align with the actions of every employee. Yet for many organizations, business and quality objectives aren’t even clear, much less aligned.

Some organizations have never thought about their business objectives in sufficient detail to commit them to measurable analysis. In other organizations, top managers are unwilling or unable to share information about overall objectives.

These aren’t new or revolutionary ideas. Quality professionals have talked about them for years. But ask yourself: Where would your organization be today if it had actually been acting on them for that long?

Reference: QP