How did your quality system get so complex and redundant?

Perhaps the single most pervasive reason top management resists the implementation of a quality management system relates to our failure, as quality professionals, to demonstrate the return on investment.

ISO 10006:2003, guidelines for quality management projects, was released in the fall of 2003. This standard is creating the next wave in our understanding of project managing processes.

There’s a marauding infestation of adverbs and adjectives that infiltrate the text of quality documents and operating procedures, wreaking havoc wherever they are found.

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.

Lean means doing the most with what you have. It’s efficiency and intelligence. In the modern economy, lean is a fact of life.

Supplier management is one of the most troublesome disciplines within a management system. There’s nothing inherently difficult about it, though. Companies make it difficult by instilling the process with lots of unwieldy bureaucracy.

Do not ever, ever, do anything just to please an auditor. This is quickly becoming one of my new favorite mantras.

After undergoing an often costly and usually painful process to achieve ISO 9001:2000 registration, organizations invariably ask, "What do we do now to ensure that we maintain our registration and gain maximum benefit?" Under ISO 9001:1994, the old answer was fairly

When is faster not better? In our warp-speed, 21st-century lives, getting the task completed on time--or ahead of time or before the competition--has become a goal in itself. We want this project done so we can move on to the next big thing.