In ‘Top Ten Reasons’, we looked at why policies and procedures don’t work.  In this post, I’ll share a little about what we do when companies ask us to help improve their policies and procedures.

“Too long”, “unclear”, and “complicated” generally top the list of “Reasons Why Procedures Don’t Work”.  We often find that clients have complex flow charts, swim lane diagrams, and subway maps, usually with no clear starting or ending point or communications objective.  When workers look at these diagrams, they don’t know how to read them — they don’t know what the author is trying to tell them.

Get Organized, Then Consider Your Communications Objectives

While capturing everything you learned while studying your process may help you, you don’t need to show that around.  Think of your spaghetti diagram as homework, but think of your procedures as having a job to do. Your procedures are responsible for communicating know-how to someone who may have an alternate view of how a task should be done.

Think of your procedures as stories, with a beginning, middle, and end.  After discerning your intent, we look in our library for something we have composed already that tells a similar story. But our procedure communicates flow, or how raw materials, information and labor come together to create value for customers. By organizing the story around flow, we can simplify your procedures, not to mention the underlying processes. Flow should be a theme in all your procedures.

When we review a client’s procedures, we compare them to stories (e.g. procedures) that we have already written. We simplify client procedures so that they communicate flow. And we add measure and balance information at transition points to keep the underlying processes running smoothly.

Procedures Should Help Work Flow

Think of work flow as the current in your favorite fishing or boating stream.  When the stream moves at a “normal” pace, the water stays within its banks.  However, if a larger-than-normal volume comes downstream, or if the normal volume encounters an obstacle (like a bunch of fallen trees), the stream rises.  Soon, the stream has nowhere to go but out of its banks. What a mess.

To maintain work flow in your company, you need to know the measure and balance that should be maintained at each transition point in your process. For example, how much raw material should Receiving hand off to Production every hour?  Every day?  Such concrete measure and balance information determines the tempo of your processes. Workers need to know the appropriate tempo to prevent production managers from being inundated with material, and prevent inventory from backing up.

Procedures communicate flow.  And other kinds of documents and communications tools have other jobs. Thinking about and achieving all the communications jobs needed to roll out a process and keep it humming along is what we call “implementation”.

After Developing Your Procedures, You Have to Tell the Story

When we review a client’s procedures, we compare them to procedures, or stories, that we’ve already written. We simplify client procedures so they communicate flow.  And we add measure and balance information at transition points to keep the underlying processes running smoothly, at the appropriate tempo.

That may end up being a lot of information — more than you would want to write in text form as a procedure — so we deploy communication tools: maps, job aids, visual work boards, training, videos, etc.  These tools get the right information to the right people at the right time, so they can do their work at the right tempo and stay in sync.  Deploying communications tools in this way is how we achieve implementation.

I’ll cover implementation in a future blog post.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has been growing in popularity because of its universal suitability as a framework for managing information technology (IT) services, including the infrastructure, development, and operations of an IT department.

In its fullest implementation, ITIL is a perfect complement to – and is perfectly complemented by – Six Sigma and Lean to create more agile and higher quality IT operations.  Using Six Sigma techniques like the DMAIC process introduces a more structured engineering approach to ITIL’s framework.  Lean thinking promotes continuous improvement and waste reduction into ITIL’s best practices.

ITIL itself does not provide methods to identify and target waste, document value streams (as is usually done with Lean), or measure customer satisfaction.  Nor is ITIL itself a transformation method used for change management.  But ITIL does provide the vocabulary and framework we think of as the process approach advocated by Deming, which is where all process improvements start.

Implementing an ITIL framework is an excellent starting point for IT organizations looking to evolve toward a more process-oriented state.  Six Sigma and Lean can be added to the ITIL framework to help your IT organization achieve continuous improvement and organizational agility.

There is general agreement among Quality Managers and Quality Auditors that process auditing is more beneficial than clause based auditing.

In clause based auditing, an organization or a segment of an organization is audited to verify it complies with a particular clause of the ISO 9001 QMS Requirements.

With process auditing, a particular process or group of processes is audited to ensure that it complies with any part or clause of the standard that applies to it.

For example, corrective action is a clause in the standard, but corrective action should also be a continual improvement process.   If you are doing a clause based audit, you would audit aspects of corrective action that are covered in the corrective action clause (8.5.2).  If you are doing a process audit of corrective action, then you would verify that the corrective action process is in compliance with all applicable sections of the standard, not just clause 8.5.2.  It could include things such as Customer focus (5.2) and Customer satisfaction (8.2.1), Competence, training and awareness (6.2.2), Control of documents (4.2.3) and records (4.2.4), Analysis of data (8.4), and (definitely) Management review (5.6).

But effective process auditing requires a good grasp of the standard, so the auditor or audit team knows which clauses of the standard apply to a particular process.  While new auditors or a newly established QMS may start with clause based auditing, the goal should be to move to process auditing as soon as the auditors and the quality team feel familiar with the standard.

As the above example demonstrates, process auditing provides a much more comprehensive and in-depth measurement of the Quality Management System, and thereby provides better value for your internal auditing efforts.