It was Dan's idea, it can't be wrong, can it? Dan hired that person, they must be Ok, it's everyone else that just need time to adjust. Dan's the leader, so must know all of the answers, doesn't he? Let's be honest, it's possible that Dan is in fact always correct and infallible, it is however unlikely. Before we go on What I if told You that you r...

Unfortunately, Most continuous improvement programs fail, either completely or they fail to live up tot eh hype and expectations that are set up front for them The reason for this is that they are focusing only on delivering the "big bang", they make a big song and dance about this new latest thing and hope that it'll work, like the noise of t...

Understanding exactly what you need to do in order to achieve ISO9001:2015 can be a bit of a challenge. Sometimes the language in the standard can be a little, well, unclear. Don't get me wrong the 2015 version of the ISO9001 standard is vastly improved over the previous versions of the standard but unless you are familiar with ISO standards a...

When an organisation makes the decision that they need to achieve the ISO9001:2015 certification there are normally a number of factors that influence the decision, because let's face it, it's not a small decision, it's one that really needs to be considered carefully since you are about to fundamentally change how your organisation functions. The ...

We all have habits; they build up over time and whether we like them or not form a large part of who we are and how we go about doing things. Before we leave the house, we check our pockets for the keys and wallet, and we know where the keys are because out of habit, we put them in the same place when we come in, the bowl by the phone or the hook a...

Last week I was involved in a conversation with a person I met at a networking event where we were discussing problems they were having at their workplace with people not following processes. They asked me what I thought they should do to get people to follow the processes and stem the flow of issues. "How Do I get these people to just do what they...

One of the great things about doing online surveys is that you can get completely honest feedback from people about virtually anything. One of the downsides of course of doing surveys is that you have to collate the data afterwards which normally means figuring out how to download it from the survey system and then get it into a spreadsheet. Once t...

You have done it, the ISO9001:2015 certificate is on the wall and all that hard work of building a Quality Management System that really delivers for your organisation is behind you, so why are we talking about a journey?   Celebrate Firstly, it is important to stop for a moment and celebrate what you and the team have achieved. It says a lot ...

Congratulations, you have got to the point where it is time for the stage 2 audit of your new ISO9001:2015 certification audit of your Quality Management System. You have spent many hours training all of your team on what the requirements are for running the organisation within your new system, people know where to find things, they are updati...

How do you measure success? Is it money? Is it fame or influence is it the ability to do what ever you want or is it something else? I'd like to argue that it is none of these, you may end up with one or all of these things of course, but is that really the way to think about it? When you think about family, friends, you think if the many memories ...

It's finally time, you have done all the hard yards and now it's time to actually get your new ISO9001:2015 system officially certified, so what exactly does that mean and how do you do it, there are a few steps to move through to get to that all important ISO9001:2015 certificate. In this post we will cover the 1st two steps.   Selecting a Ce...

As we have worked through all of the clauses within ISO9001 in this blog series we have highlighted a number of areas where you need a document or need to be keeping a record of things, but to be fair, it may be hard to keep track and to be honest with so many clauses it can be a little overwhelming. It's not unusual for people to believe that abso...

A month ago I caught up with some friends for a drink and a chat to set the worlds to rights. I should explain that means we had a really good chat about everything that was bugging us and shared our various opinions on how to go about fixing it. Back home in Scotland, it's a great pastime, in part I think as a way of venting and letting off steam ...

When we start talking to organisations about the use of checklists in their operations to ensure nothing gets missed and what needs to get check or inspected gets, well, checked and inspected we get a lot of push back. It's accepted that checklists are prevalent in HR for things like inductions, health and safety programs have no end of checklists ...

The management review is possibly one of the most useful parts of the entire standard yet it's also one of the most underused! ISO9001:2015 Clause 9.3 is all about the requirements for that management review and the very 1st part 9.3.1 gives us a bit of a general overview of the point of the clause.   General Expectations of the Managemen...

Martin looked at the calendar on his wall and back to the invite on the screen to the off-site review. That can't be right he thought, we only just had an off-site to figure out this strategy stuff. He cast his mind back to the 2 days they had spent at the Hermitage Hotel in Mt Cook Village, it had become one of his favourite places on earth, the w...

When we talk to people about ISO9001 there are a few things that come up as the reasons not to do it, one is the need to document things, the other is around non-conformance and the final one is always the need for doing internal audits. Typically, I get told we fail enough external audits to know what we need to fix anyway! Or worse – we never fai...

Let's face it if you are working through ISO9001:2015 you already know that you need to monitor, measure, analyse and evaluate your quality management system, we talked about it way back in Clause 4.4 and again in Clause 6.2. You already understand why it's important so why is it here again in ISO9001:2015 Clause 9.1.1? I guess you could look at th...