Thursday Q&A - Management Reviews and Design Processes

We put the call out to our Newsletter readers, on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for questions. Questions that people are struggling with around ISO, Lean or leadership that they wanted help with and we got some fantastic responses that we have loved reading through and thinking about how we can help. We can't answer everything but we'll do our best to get through as many as we can. Welcome, to the Thursday Q&A!

This Week's Questions 

In our 1st session we are answering questions about ISO9001, specifically around doing better Management Reviews and how to ensure that your design process meets the design requirements of the standard, so lets dive in! 

Question 1

Our first question is around Management Reviews most ISO standards have the requirement for you to have them and the question is a really good one question is how do i get everyone in a room and paying attention for four hours, that's how long our management review tends to take and I'm really struggling to get people involved.

Well it's no wonder four hours is a heck a long time to have management review even if you do bring some tea and some cakes and some biscuits so here's a little thing to think about, there's nothing in any of the systems that says you have to have the Management Review in one big sit-down session why not break it up? You can have it over a number of weeks number of months as long as over the period of time you've decided you cover everything that the standard's asking you to look at. So, think about having a session where you're only going to cover your non-conformances or maybe join a couple of them up talk about the risks to the business, you talk about the suppliers. Do them in small buy size chunks and that way people are going to be more involved and you're going to get through them in about 20 to 30 minutes.

Question 2

Another great question from our mailbox for our Thursday Q&A sessions, this one is around the design process and the question's really short but quite telling. What things do i have to do to make sure that my design process meets the requirements of ISO how do I know I'm doing all the right things it's not an uncommon question the thing to remember is ISO is about framework it's not about do this do that ISO is not going to tell you the nitty-gritty detail that you have to do for your product because it's your business it's your products. What they are going to tell you is there are certain things you have to look at you have to look at the user needs and those users could be the end users they can also be your people manufacturing the product as well you have to think about what the design inputs your product are what are the things that it has to meet and ISO has got some clues around that within the standard you have to think about your design outputs and what things are going to come out of your design to allow you to manufacture that and you have to verify that those design outputs you've come up with meet your design inputs so if you've asked for a red box have you design the red box finally in your final product you have to make sure that that final product meets what the user needs were is a red box and is that red box four inches square if it is great if you design something that comes out and it's seven inches square it does meet the requirements and you failed. That's the process that ISO recommends and it's looking for you to have systems in place for each one of those processes now you can combine some of those processes together you can combine the design output and the verification process into one process that's entirely up to you can have something external doing your validation absolutely up to you many companies do that so it's around developing a design process that's going to work for you as a business that is going to be easy to work with and consistent. That's how you meet the requirements

Got a question

We'd love to hear from you on any questions you have on ISO Management Systems, lean or leadership. Just pop your question in the section below and we'll put it into hat for things we are answering with the Thursday Q&A Sessions.