16 | Official Magazine of the New Zealand Organisation for Quality – May 2015

Q share: Systems thinking

When risk, quality and conventional management practice collide…W. Edwards Deming wrote, “Quality is everyone’s responsibility” and I agree, writes QNewZ columnist, Sarah Benjamin.

ISO are in the fifth stage of a six-part revision of their 9001 Standard. Two of the reasons for doing this are to build in more of a process approach to the Standard (rather than a procedural approach, as I understand it) and to place greater emphasis of ‘risk-based thinking’. The intention of these changes is to help organisations prevent undesirable outcomes. This is very admirable in their intent and sounds very rational and achievable, but will it work?

Quality and risk linkedISO saw its birth in the munitions factories during WWII where the intent was to prevent accidents in the workplace (explosions, often!) through insistence on procedures being thoroughly documented and independently checked. This also ensured quality of output against specification. Therefore it became an approach that relies on independent verification of procedures which are typically translated into the workplace as control of the work through procedure, specifications and audit.

Quality should be designed into the work such that independent review or concern should not be necessary, while simultaneously designing out risk. Therefore the two are inextricably linked: quality should be built in, not enforced through a series of ‘inspections’ and ‘hand slaps’ at the end of a process; risk, understood and genuinely mitigated, should be designed out.

I have observed in many organisations that risk typically becomes an exercise in adherence. Adherence to the standard, procedure or best practice, and often relegated to a poorly understood tick box for the front line.

Are we certain that standards, procedures or best practice guides work for us? How do we know? How applicable are they really to what we need to do for the customer? And to what extent is it inhibiting our ability to absorb the variety which will be hitting us at the front end of our service delivery?

The method by which we actually understand this is, in my opinion, typically sadly lacking.

Ask the frontline about service delivery Quality thinking, or risk-based thinking, in my view, will only prove truly effective when we begin to understand it in an entirely different way to conventional methods. This is because it requires a different way of thinking about the work and those who do the work.

Rather than ‘control’ output, we should aim to continuously improve it by reducing the variation within. For this to be successful we all have to be involved and understand and

design for the variation which our customers bring to the front line. Often people may essentially want the same thing, but its delivery needs to vary. Is this true of your organisation? If you don’t know then go to the front line, ask them what gets in the way. If they have to circumvent the system to make it work, in any way, then that undermines quality and potentially increases your risk.

Ask your staff if they understand the steps within the process they are working in; whether they understand the requirements within it; or what might be needed and provided in order for the service to be delivered.

How well can they talk in operational terms about quality and risk? What measures and data do they have in place to help them understand on a daily basis and how often do they see their managers in the work with them helping them to solve these problems?

Knowledge mitigates risk The only thing I have ever found that mitigates risk is knowledge. But not just of the perceived risk or of the risks that might generally be associated with the type of work, process or industry we may be working within. We should be looking for a comprehensive data-based understanding of our own processes, how well they work today, in reality, and then understand risk in actual terms. This will enable us to understand the magnitude of risk (or not) in our own processes.

Often risk mitigation is based largely on the experience of others, best practice, benchmarking, industry standards and so on, without ever really understanding it in relation to this organisation.

In a typically hierarchical organisation this happens away from the front line, with process decisions and changes ‘cascaded’ through to operations with little or no context or understanding. And this tends to produce a re-working of the design when it hits the front line, for a variety of different reasons.

It may not make sense and is seen to simply slow up work, so we circumvent it or turn it off. This is particularly likely if we are also monitored and (heaven forbid) incentivised through achievement of output.

Alternatively, it remains part of the process but is simply another step to go through without thought, attention or understanding and no opportunity to further improve upon it. This is the tick box exercise every time we ‘do one’.

If instruction has been poor or unclear to those on the receiving end – which often happens in conventional training methods – then we are never really quite sure how well these things have been operationalised. How many times have

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18 | Official Magazine of the New Zealand Organisation for Quality – May 2015

Q share

processes that in practice are not aligned in their final outcomes. The outsourcing of processes and the use of sub-contractors, which is common in many industries, only exacerbates this.

It takes great leadership and clarity of purpose to overcome these problems. Purely seeing the next person in the process (internal customer) as the customer in this instance can lead to this discontinuity. Leadership and a clear vision are required to ensure the whole Value Chain is directed to the ultimate customer and that whilst efficiencies can be obtained by addressing the needs of internal customers (which is very important) they should never subsume the needs of the ultimate customer.

In the modern world of business where Value Chains traverse many suppliers, sub-contractors, countries and regulations, the management of the Value Chain is perhaps more difficult than it has ever been.

Disclaimer: The author of this column is a happy owner of a time-share scheme where all the contributors to the Value Chain belong to the one company which seems to be focused on the needs of the customer. Perhaps I am biased or just lucky.

For further information or to comment please contact rrveitch@optusnet.com.au

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you heard people say “everyone is doing things differently, there’s no consistency”?

No wonder processes end up bigger than Ben Hur; the front line gets confused with what to focus on, or how, and largely ignore ‘it’ if’ it’ is just ‘getting in the way’, and so checking and inspection increases, yet we still have errors. Only now we also have a whole level of operational risk built in by our design and management of the very thing we were looking to avoid in the first place.

Blue box: “If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.” (W. Edwards Deming)

Everyone is involved in process design W. Edwards Deming wrote: “If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.” This means that in order to be successful in designing quality in and risk out, the entire process must be understood, and conscious thought and consideration be part of every step for everyone involved.

How many managers can truly say that this is the state of front-line working? Or that their own knowledge of the ‘what and why’ of operations is to that degree?

We continue to spend huge amounts of time and energy

worrying about, waiting for and trying to design out risk, and wanting quality to increase. But as Taiichi Ohno taught us with his Toyota Production System, in order to really achieve what we profess we want from such things, we have to re-think our approach and application in the workplace.

Risk assurance and quality management have been talked about for years, often with no significant change or impact. When we at Vanguard surveyed members of ISO in the ‘90s, most reported that they had achieved little more than 15% of the benefits claimed to be achievable, and indeed many reported an increase in time spent on paperwork and bureaucracy in their newly-devised processes. While the processes passed the audit, dissatisfaction was created for customers. Most of the members surveyed admitted that they became accredited simply because it was expected by the industry. I suspect little has changed.

We will not know the impact of the revised ISO for a while yet, but my concern is that it will just rework the same problems, rather than design them out.

Isn’t it about time to re-think quality and risk – not just revise it?

For further information and to comment please contact Sarah.Benjamin@vanguardconsult.co.uk

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