“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…
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,…
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…
Organizations don’t need structured management systems. Hard work, knowledge and experience will make organizations work effectively. In the old days we never had all of these systems and procedures and instructions and we got the job done. This is true. If your objective is to do things right 95% of the time. But what about the other 5%? Management systems…