Bendigo SEO and web development expert John Cullen, of http://purencool.digital, interviews David Stephensen of QDT Management Consultants about intranet-based procedure manuals and quality management systems.
http://purencool.digital/local-business-talks-digital-qdts-david-stephensen
In the bad old days, the ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems standard was poorly understood and very labour-intensive. There was a lot of paperwork. Consultants would set up documents in folders. Management would laboriously drag them out, sometimes just before audit time. Few people really understood.
These days, consciousness and technology have caught up and the standard has also evolved. Records are easier to keep, and procedures easier to publish electronically. I believe that ideas like risk, the process view, customer focus and continual improvement are more widely understood. In the new 2015 version of the standard, management has to consider context and stakeholders and decide what quality management is appropriate. It does not spell out specific documented procedures, so lazy managers can no longer buy them off the shelf and pretend that they are in use.
For most businesses ISO 9001 certification does take some effort and expense, but brings benefits. We only work with clients who are serious about benefiting from the ISO 9001 journey as well as getting the certification. Most of them are already at least half way there. The goal of being certified to the standard motivates them to introduce the practices that they know they should have had anyway.
We pledge to our clients that we’ll help them make sure everything they introduce for ISO 9001 will make sense and benefit their business. For more about our approach to certification, see ISO 9001 (and other standards)— 7 steps or contact us.
A quiz question for you: What is the only internationally recognised colour sequence? The rainbow! How can we use this in information design? We can use it to illustrate a hierarchy or sequence.
For example, we can use it to indentify the document hierarchy levels in a procedure manual. Assign a rainbow colour to the level of each type of document. In our practice, we use red for the document type with the least detail, the policy or set of rules, and violet for the most detailed information level, the data collection form and the database.
Here is an example of some topics from a procedure, showing the colour coding
Do you have an important concept for your team or your clients to understand and you have to get it right? To discuss using colour sequences to get the message across, please contact us.
This is about the point, the unit of measure for font size. We talk about ’10 point’ or ’18 point’ type, but what exactly does this mean?
We measure font size as the distance between the bottom of the descender (for example, the bottom of the tail of a lower case ‘p’), and the top of the ascender (for example the top of a lower case ‘h’). The unit of measure is the point, which is 1/72 of an inch, or about 0.35 mm.
The world of fonts goes back a long way and these days is both and art and a science. For more information, start here in Wikipedia.
Rhetoric is persuasive communication. Shouldn’t work instructions just contain the instructions? We argue that there is a place for persuasion.
Do your team members sometimes cut corners in their work? Of course they do. Why? Often it is because they don’t see the value in the step that they are skipping. You want team members who act intelligently. Well, they are doing that, saving themselves trouble and getting the job done faster for you!
Of course you put those details in for a reason, but the team may not understand that reason. Adding a persuasive element to your work instructions can motivate team members and help them understand about the details.
There are four types of persuasive instruction writing you can use:
Look at the instructions you write for team members and see if some persuasion would make the instructions more effective.
If you have challenges with team members complying with instructions, get in contact with us.
The management standards like ISO 9001 refer to ‘corrective action’, but what does it mean? It is more than just correcting something. You don’t want the problem to happen again, do you?
Here are the steps to follow:
To illustrate, here is a story about how we dealt with the mice in our kitchen:
The ‘Rolls Royce’ of corrective action systems (well, the Ford Motor Company’s system, actually) is the 8 Disciplines (8D). You can read about it here.
Things that go wrong can be costly, so make sure you get the the bottom of the problem. We have a system that uses free software to track your issues and tasks.
If you’d like to discuss your issue and task management please contact us.
Most of my Word tips focus on persuading people to use the keyboard instead of the mouse, because it is quicker and there is less repetitive strain. Today I couldn’t resist throwing in a mouse one. Here are your tips. To:
In this article we explain why it is better to organise your procedure manual so that it suits your team, not so that it suits your auditor.
Just because you are getting ISO9001 certification does not mean that the table of contents of your procedures manual has to follow the clauses of ISO9001. Your procedures manual needs a table of contents that fits your business.
Don’t worry about the auditors. They don’t need to be spoon-fed your ISO 9001 compliance. Your procedures manual is for your team, not for the auditor! The auditor knows ISO9001 back to front and can easily assess whether your procedures manual is compliant.
You can think of your business as a hierarchy or as a process. Which is better to dominate your procedures manual? Since procedures are action, then the process view is surely better. isn’t it?
If you take the process view, you can think of your business like a play. The play has a script. It is divided into acts and scenes. Think of each act as a different area of your business. There is the Sales act, the Marketing act, the Human Resources Management act and so on.
Each act has a number of scenes. In the Sales act, there is the scene where people close a sale, another where they have a meeting to review sales performance and another where they deal with customer follow up, feedback and issues.
In a scene, which we like to call a Procedure, the team members involved have different Roles and communicate with each other to achieve the purpose of the scene. We call what each Role does an Activity.
In our opinion, the best and most organic table of contents for a procedures manual is the acts and scenes (business areas and procedures) that make up the business.
Now there may be a lot involved in a procedure. In the play analogy, it could be that a Role has a particularly long speech to make. Instead of including the whole speech in the scene, we include it as a support document. We call this a Work Instruction.
So a play has acts, scenes and speeches, and your business has business areas, procedures and work instructions.
We can help you think through the acts, scenes and speeches of your business and guide you through creating your procedures manual, whether or not you are going for ISO 9001 certification.
We help to make management easy. Contact us.