Scope
Implementing the ISO system is a harrowing experience.
Even with the help of consultants, it can be a frustrating
process. Sometimes it seems to be deliberately confusing,
mysterious, and obfuscated. The consultants and quality
assurance personnel often seem incapable of explaining the why's
and how's to the lay person. This text was written by
someone who has been through the process from the worker and
management side and attempts to clear away the smoke and
mirrors.
Why?
Will your company benefit from the implementation of ISO?
The answer is almost always a resounding yes. Most
companies can be assigned to one of three categories:
those who have their stuff together, those who don't, and those
who are sliding from the first to the latter. Companies in
the first category have written procedures for design and
manufacturing. Products, ideas, designs, and contracts are
handled in a consistent logical manner which is documented and
traceable. Meetings are held to ensure that all interested
parties are privy to what is going on and actions are reviewed
to assess their validity and success in order to prevent
perpetuating failure. Renegade workers are limited in
their ability to introduce complications. Companies in the
second category operate haphazardly, rarely doing anything the
same way twice. Designs, documents, procedures, changes,
and products are not traceable. Everybody operates in
their own world with as little interaction with other groups as
possible. People develop and protect secrets and develop
fiefdoms. Managers are terrified to fire anyone who might
have key knowledge. These companies survive, but it is a
desperate existence populated with miserable workers.
Companies in the last category are usually in the process of
degrading into chaos due to tightened budgets and shrinking
management and support personnel.
ISO is disguised as nothing more than a "quality system".
In reality, it is a template for how to run a business.
This is a very important fact that the quality people
don't want to say out loud and management does not want to hear.
You may be saying at this point that you don't need a template.
You may think that you know how to run your business. The
truth is that you probably do not. If you did, your
designs wouldn't always be way late and way over budget,
miscommunications and blame laying wouldn't be built into every
move, every new project wouldn't be chaos, products wouldn't
keep failing over and over for the same reasons, you wouldn't
have to rely on the weird guy with the temper to fly to Timbuktu
to fix that one weird system while you held your breath hoping
that he won't flake out for the umpteenth time.
Where did you learn to run your company? From the ground
up? From a university? People learning from the
ground up rarely have the vision or fortitude to implement
sweeping changes in the entrenched system. Universities do
teach a lot of the principles embodied by ISO, but applying
those principles inside an established company can be nearly
impossible. By the time a fresh graduate gains enough
respect and power inside of a company to make such changes, the
desire to do so is often found to be lacking.Implementation
The implementation of ISO, once begun, provides a crutch or
club to help the process along. Questions such as "Why?",
when no other answer seems to suffice, can be answered by "Because
it must be done to satisfy ISO requirements". This may
sound like a cop out, and the phrase will be heard often from
the quality team - especially late in the game when time is
running out before the first audit. As a manager, it is
important to understand why.
Regardless of what your consultants may tell you, your
workers are going to fight ISO fiercely. At first, they
will appear to be enthusiastic and may actually be so.
Later they will pretend to be compliant in meetings with
management, but will be fighting the quality team tooth and nail
at every opportunity. Finally, all pretense of compliance
will disappear and they will be openly hostile to the process.
This is especially true of engineers, programmers, and managers.
The higher up the ladder the worker is positioned, the more
resistance will be shown. Ever since the
disastrous introduction of the pancake management structure
containing very few managers, white collar workers have grown
accustomed to setting their own rules and they are very
resistant to new paradigms. In the end, cooperation
between the quality team in charge of implementing ISO and the
workers will disintegrate. Out of exasperation, the
quality team will generally resort to brute force tactics to get
the job done.
Management must side with the quality team at all cost.
An oft repeated mantra from the quality folks is "ISO is not
meant to be punishment or a reason to fire a worker". If
you ask them what to do about a person who absolutely refuses to
comply with ISO requirements, the quality guys love to use the
neat little phrase "management must be committed to the
process". This can be very confusing unless you
understand what it means. It means that as a manager you
must terminate any employee who stands in the way of the
implementation.
Now comes the hard part. The employees most likely to
buck against the implementation are the "key" employees.
The ones who know all the secrets and throw all the temper
tantrums. Can you possibly terminate them? Will it
benefit your company? Will the company survive?
Yes, Yes, and Yes. Use the ISO process
to pry their secrets from them and onto paper. Replace or
upgrade any systems or products which your company cannot
support without the key workers. Embrace it. Do it.
Sometimes terminating the worst offender can have an amazing
effect on other problem employees and often brings a sigh of
relief to your best workers.
An alternative solution to dealing with a problem engineer or
researcher who is a true genius is to isolate them. All
information passed to or from them is handled by other workers
who apply ISO principles. The genius is never allowed to
deal directly with the final product or customer. This
layered approach may seem to be inefficient, but it prevents
undocumented products and the accumulation of secrets.
Before any idea from the genius is implemented, it is committed
to paper and handled per the ISO system. No one outside of
engineers or researchers should be afforded the privilege of the
pampering required by isolation. Avoid at all cost the
temptation of retaining process workers and technicians who
cannot work within the boundaries of the ISO system. If
all else fails, make them instructors.
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