Re: Re Assurance and Improvement

[Rip Stauffer <ripstaur@vabch.com>]

Why are we going through this ISO 9000 debate again?

Maybe the new standard is better. I don't know. It looks better to me.
Most of us seem to agree on a couple of things: ISO 900x does not
guarantee any level of quality, nor does it require any company to ever
improve anything, as long as they document that non-improvement.

Having said that, though, I have to believe that that alone is not
enough to make ISO 9000 evil incarnate. The biggest problem I can see
with it is that people use it without profound knowledge. There are
other problems, i.e. consultants "installing" ISO 900x in isolation,
charging huge money then walking away without using that opportunity to
raise general quality awarenes;  managers coming to believe that if they
are ISO 900x registered they are "doing" quality, or some combination of
the above. John Seddon has written very well on this subject and has
wonderful examples of the harm registration can do.

I have seen SPC used very badly to great harm because it was used
without the benefit of systems thinking or any understanding of
variation. But I would not go on a crusade to kill SPC. I have seen a
quality award winner in terrible shape because they were given the award
due to political decisions, and were not in any way really ready for it;
but I wouldn't go on a crusade against quality awards, either. (I used
to think NQAs were inherently evil, but after doing a bunch of research
to prove that hypothesis, I was forced to reject that hypothesis. In the
right hands, they do much more good than harm.)

One sad fact of life is that some entities require businesses to
register in order to do business in certain markets. I would not tell a
client who needed it that I would not help with ISO registration because
I don't think it will improve quality. That client may need it to
survive.

I think that if we want to act, we should act to make business and
especially those regulating committees aware of the limitations of ISO
900x standards, so that unnecessary trade restrictions can be dropped.
Also, I would offer to help a client implement ISO 900x, but would
insist in the contract that registration would only be a side trip on
the quality journey. Along with registration, we use the quality system
that we've documented to actually optimize the system of production
toward continually improving the quality of product and service. I can
tell you from actual experience that that tactic can work very well.

Is ISO 900x useless? I believe that in a perfect world, it would be. We
don't live in that world yet. Right now, in the hands of a Deming
scholar, it could be a dialog-opener. It could provide a forum for
raising quality awareness in an organization (and maybe in its customers
and suppliers).

But that's just my opinion. I could be out to lunch.

Rip Stauffer
BlueFire Partners
612-344-1027
rstauffer@bluefirepartners.com

[Moderator's suggestion:  For those of you with such strong interest in the
ISO standards - might I suggest one of the many good ISO lists that may be
found at http://www.quality.org  Bill Casti has assembled the master list
of quality lists.
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