Managing change

Why Do A Root Cause Analysis – What’s In It For Me?

Ever since the first non-conformance was written, we’ve been looking for ways to find the cause, do a corrective action and bid farewell to the profit sucking problem. It’s been a problem closing out non-conformances since I’ve been associated with ISO – 1992. All the studies of ‘Top non-conformances’ from Registrars showed closeouts as the […]

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Two Management System Mistakes We Make

Seth Godin is one of my favourite authors – a great thinker and terrific business person. Even though he’s not ‘ISO’ his thoughts on ‘systems’ fit beautifully. The first mistake we make is the underestimation of the importance of something. Think of the internet. We assume it’s stable and will always work. We don’t really

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From ‘Thinking’ to ‘Action’

This is a solid set of steps developed by James P. Womack in his book Lean Thinking. He was into the Lean stream very early and has done some great work. He mentions Taiichi Ohno and The Toyota Production System in his work as well. Womack’s 8 steps to get from ‘Thinking’ to ‘Action’: Overcome inertia

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Learn to ‘See’… Learn to ‘Lead’

John Seddon, Vanguard Consulting, published a book in 2005 called “Freedom from Command and Control”. Definitely worth reading if you’re interested in tapping the vast potential of any workforce. One of his interesting ideas is ‘Learn to see, learn to lead’ and it made complete sense to me. What a leaders learn from looking at

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Give your employees credit for having a brain

One way to simplify your management system is to reduce the number of super-detailed text-based procedures. Once they are in place, you might be temped to audit simply to see if everyone’s following them. This causes two problems. The first problem is that the ‘follow the procedures or else’ message creates a culture of fear.

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Trade off other Values for Quality??

Building Block #9 You need to be ready to trade off other values in favour of Quality There’s an anecdotal ‘constraint model’ in the world of Engineering: Quality – Price – Timing: pick any two. By staying focused on ‘errors are unacceptable’ (or at least have a rate of errors we can live with) we

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