There are two schools of thought on quality management. One views quality

management as the management of success and the other the elimination of

failure. They are both valid. Each approaches the subject from a different

angle:

The ‘success’ school is characterized by five questions (Hoyle, David and

Thompson, John, 2001)3 :

1 What are you trying to do?

2 How do you make it happen?

3 How do you know it’s right?

4 How do you know it’s the best way of doing it?

5 How do you know it’s the right thing to do?

The ‘failure elimination’ school is characterized by five different questions

1 How do you know what is needed?

2 What could affect your ability to do it right?

3 What checks are made to verify achievement?

4 How do you ensure the integrity of these checks?

5 What action is taken to prevent a recurrence of failure?

In an ideal world, if we could design products, services and processes that

could not fail we would have achieved the ultimate goal. Success means not

only that products, services and processes fulfil their function but also that the

function is what customers’ desire. Failure means not only that products,

services and processes would fail to fulfil their function but also that their

function was not what customers desired. A gold-plated mousetrap that does

not fail is not a success if no one needs a gold-plated mousetrap!

The introductory clause of ISO 9001:1994 contained a statement that the aim

of the requirements is to achieve customer satisfaction by prevention of

nonconformities. (This was indicative of the failure school of thought.) The

introductory clause of ISO 9001:2000 contains a statement that the aim is to

enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the quality

management system and the assurance of conformity to customer and

applicable regulatory requirements. (This is indicative of the success school of

thought.)

In reality you cannot be successful unless you know of the risks you are

taking and plan to eliminate, reduce or control them. A unification of these

approaches is what is therefore needed for organizations to achieve, sustain

and improve quality. You therefore need to approach the achievement of

quality from two different angles and answer two questions. What do we need

to do to succeed and what do we need to do to prevent failure?

Quality does not appear by chance, or if it does it may not be repeated. One

has to design quality into the products and services. It has often been said that

one cannot inspect quality into a product. A product remains the same after

inspection as it did before, so no amount of inspection will change the quality

of the product. However, what inspection does is measure quality in a way that

allows us to make decisions on whether or not to release a piece of work. Work

that passes inspection should be quality work but inspection unfortunately is

not 100% reliable. Most inspection relies on human judgement and this can be

affected by many factors, some of which are outside our control (such as the

private life, health or mood of the inspector). We may also fail to predict the

effect that our decisions have on others. Sometimes we go to great lengths in

preparing organization changes and find to our surprise that we neglected

something or underestimated the effect of something. We therefore need other

means to deliver quality products – we have to adopt practices that enable us

to achieve our objectives while preventing failures from occurring.

Quality Manual & Standard Procedures template can obtain from http://www.iso-consults.com