Our Blog
On Quality, Management and Thought Processes
Critical Thinking in the Workplace
Critical Thinking is thinking that is reflective, open-minded yet purposeful and directed. During the early industrial revolution, employees were essentially considered machines. Employers neither wanted nor expected them to think. Today in our constantly changing and evolving work places with the constant requirement to improve our products, services and prices, no organization can exist let alone succeed without the active…
Turtle Diagrams – A Misconception
There is certainly a lot of material available on Turtle Diagrams. When reading through some recently, I found myself thinking that there are still many consultants and auditors that seem to miss the true objective and functional uses of the Turtle Diagram. The Turtle Diagram was first introduced by Philip Crosby who is well known for his work Quality is…
A Little About Our Process Audit Toolkit
Our free Process Audit Toolkit is designed to help internal auditors plan, document and report an audit in a format consistent with ISO requirements and do it effectively without a great deal of paperwork. I’ve taught internal auditors for over twenty years and one thing that I’ve noticed is that almost everyone has challenges with planning audits. When the plan…
A Personal Message from Pat Ambrose
I’ve wanted to create a website like this for a long time. The hardest thing for me was how to introduce myself and the site in a way that would convince you that the information provided is valuable and worth your time. I have been lucky enough to have had my career parallel the development of quality. You could say…
Five Strategies to Influence Our Thinking
Every day in many ways people try to influence our thinking. Here are five brief examples of how people try to get us to comply with their wishes through the arguments that they make. Critical thought about these statements can help avoid poor decisions. This is an Appeal to Indirect Consequences. There is a big jump between not getting certified…
Customer Expectations – Do What You Say
“Say what you do and do what you say.” This was a popular line from almost everyone’s ISO 9000 presentations in the 1990’s. Unfortunately people are smart and many interpreted that saying as an opportunity to describe their management systems in terms that were easy to show that they did what they said even though what they did was totally…
Interpreting Conformity, Efficiency and Effectiveness
Two separate events over the past couple of weeks caused me concern. First someone told me that we must consider auditing conformity as being equally important to the consideration of effectiveness since both were required. The statement caused me to pause. True I thought, the standards are full of requirements for conformity. This statement reminded me of the other event,…
Audit Evidence for Management System Auditors
In my job as a trainer of Quality Auditors, one of the things that I run into regularly is a misunderstanding of the requirement for auditors to have an evidence-based approach. Evidence is one of those terms that everyone automatically assumes that they understand, but when it comes to determining what is evidence they often run into problems. The problem…