Solving problems is not specifically a management task, but managers are faced with a lot of daily problems that need to be solved.  As a manager you have a slightly different set of resources than your employees.  So how do you, as a manager, go about solving your issues?  There are ten ways that management solves problems.

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There are two types of actions in an ISO 9001 Quality Management System: Corrective action and preventive action.  Many people struggle with just what a preventive action looks like and how it differs from a corrective action.  What’s funny about this discussion is how everyone tries to explain the difference as merely an interpretation of the words “occurrence” and “potential”.

For example, the ISO 9000:2005 definition states:

Corrective Action (Clause 3.6.5):
action to eliminate the cause of a detected nonconformity and its recurrence.

Preventive Action (Clause 3.6.4):
action to eliminate the cause of a potential nonconformity and its occurrence.

But does this really clear it up for anyone?

What’s the Difference between Corrective Action and Preventive Action?

Corrective action is performed on detected nonconformities.  In other words, there are real defects that exist right now

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Policies are most often rooted in undesired consequences.  Something happens that shouldn’t — a door isn’t secure from the outside and someone gets in your building who doesn’t belong — and a policy (i.e., “That door is for exiting the building ONLY in case of emergencies.  It is NEVER to be used as an entry.”) is enacted.

A few — such as high-level, or corporation-wide — policies are designed to promote desirable consequences for an organization, as well as prevent undesired ones.  In this article, we’re going to stick with the first kind.  In any case, the best policies give everyone in the organization a sense of purpose and direction.  So…how do you write a good policy?

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You have identified a problem, and you have made an immediate correction to fix it for now.  How do you make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again?

That is the role of corrective action in continual improvement of an organization.  In a reactive organization, we constantly react to problems in a corrective mode.  We make the short term fixes – over and over and over again. 

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Last week we identified the most common process maturity level in many organizations, phase one — Reactive.  Few organizations are able to advance much farther up in management system maturity.  This week we will look at the next two levels in our process maturity model that describe the phases in which an effective management system comes to life.  The Documentation and Stability Phases.

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