We all love exceptions. They afford us unfettered permission to break the rules. They are the vehicles we use to get around “things”—whatever those things happen to be.

For those of us who attended elementary school in the sixties, the tradition of exceptions reaches deep down to our grammatical roots. Your earliest recollection is probably wrapped around some bizarre bit of nostalgia associated with the recitation of a grammar rule like: “I before E, except after C, and except when pronounced like A.” And that’s the point of this article: even exceptions have rules.

Exceptions are an acknowledgement that not everything fits neatly into the less-than-tidy constructs that we use to define and navigate through our world. They are concessions that things aren’t perfect, but we still have to deal with them.

Failure to have plans (rules) to deal with exceptions pertaining to quality management processes and requirements is an avoidable cause of some of the nonconformances that arise during audits. Too often an auditee will attempt to rationalize away the non-fulfillment of a requirement by saying: “But that’s an exception. We only do that for one customer,” or, “We are just doing it that way until we use up the old inventory.”

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