SV: Seddon on Six Sigma

[Øgland - Petter <petter.ogland@skatteetaten.no>]

John Seddon wrote:

>My understanding of the book "In pursuit of quality - the case against
> ISO9000", is that it has more to do with how ISO 9000 could be a dangerous
> tool, when put in the hands of incompetent people (non-demingites), rather
> than just an attack of the standard itself.<<
>
> I would say the book attacked the underlying (bad) theory implicit in the
> Standard. Even in 'good' hands you can't do a good job with bad theory.

But is the standard really bad?  If a company had a quality management
system working according to the Deming standards, wouldn't it be quite easy
to get an ISO 9001:2000 certificat?  Here are the ten points for the first
edition of the book:

1. ISO 9000 encourages organisations to act in a way which make things worse
for their customers

2. Quality by inspection is not quality

3. ISO 9000 starts from the flawed presumption that work is best controlled
by specifying and controlling procedures

4. The typical method of implementation is bound to cause sub-optimisation
of performance

5. The Standard relies too much on people's, and in particular assorssors',
interpretation of quality

6. The Standard promotes, encourages, and explicitly demands actions which
cause sub-optimisation

7. When people are subjected to external controls, they will be inclined to
pay attention only to those things which are affected by controls

8. ISO 9000 has discouraged managers from learning about the theory of
variation

9. ISO 9000 has failed to foster good customer-supplier relations

10. As an intervention, ISO 9000 has not encouraged managers to think
differently

The book contains numerous examples of badly implemented quality management
systems, illustrating each of the points, but as far as I can see, what is
being illustrated is not that the theory in itself is wrong, not in the case
of ISO 9001:2000 anyway, only that it is insufficient.  Without a proper
understanding of the Deming philosophy of quality management, things can go
really wrong.

If we look at the ISO 9001:2000 standards, there are a great number of
additional standards in the 9000 and 10000 series that are produced for
helping people implement their QMS in correpondence with the Deming
philosophy, such as ISO 10012 and ISO 10017.

>From my point of view, ISO 9000 seems to be a very good thing indeed, as it
gives structure for implementing the Deming philosophy, and it makes it
possible to compare and benchmark quality management systems between
organisations by, for instance, using the ISO 9004 standard.  What do you
say, David?


Petter