Quality certifications are valuable marketing assets. Certifying your company to any of the popular quality standards can make both you and your company look good, and may even fool some customers into thinking you are better than your competitors. While on the face of it such certifications can appear daunting, there are ways to obtain them with minimal impact to your your putting practice though you’ll still have to pay the auditing organization’s fees and bring in an experienced coordinator (preferably on contract so you can drop them from the payroll after your certifications are in place).
First, choose the certification you want carefully. ISO9000 certification (link), for example, is well recognized, has many established and accredited auditors. This certification has been around since the 1980’s, and there has been plenty of time for many companies to figure out how to not just get around it, but to appear to be embracing it and thereby reap the benefits at lowest possible cost. In this case achieving low cost means changing your existing ways of doing business as little as possible.
Many smart companies hire a specialist – someone with experience leading a certification effort – to help them get certified. The good supply of experienced ISO coordinators will make it easy to find one who can slide you smoothly into an ISO certification that will not only enhance your market position and make you look like a truly modern business leader, but also do it at a good price. Such a person can be an expert point of contact in dealings with the certifying and auditing organizations. They will know which auditing organizations are going to be most hungry for fees, and which are least likely to find anything that would block certification.
Preparation is key, but need not be expensive. Your hired expert can assemble a binder of appropriate reference materials to show the auditors. Such a binder will include basic business documents like an organization chart, a list of key records and documents used in the business, and some procedures for creating, approving, and storing them. It is possible you may need to document a few company procedures to flesh in the binder, but, in the end, it can be made substantial enough to impress a well-chosen auditor with how organized and under control your company is, and will be enough to get you that prized certification.
Passing audits is easier than ever with a bit of strategic planning. Since an auditor’s or appraiser’s job is to find discrepancies, you can make his or her job easier by creating a few well-placed issues to be documented. A “red herring” may be achieved by a measure as simple as putting a product or component on the wrong shelf in the shipping or manufacturing area, or not labeling a few shelves in one of these areas. The resulting audit finding can be easily resolved by labeling the shelves, demonstrating that the offending articles are properly stored, and training the people working in the area in how to answer if auditors ask them about such things. Distributing some binders of procedures to appropriate work areas and instructing workers to consult the binder if an auditor asks them a question is a good idea, and fairly low cost. Putting copies of the procedures on the company intranet and printing the link on the quality policy copy posted at every desk will complete the preparation and be even cheaper. Be sure to book the auditors rooms at the best hotel around, and take them out for meals during the audit (only in the best gourmet restaurants, of course) to discuss their findings in private.
During the audit, have your coordinator guide the auditors to not only monitor where they are going, what they are seeing, and whom they are speaking with, but to subtly steer or distract them at strategic times to help you pass the audit. Make sure all employees are on the alert and know to point out the quality policy posted above their desks, identify the website and/or binder where company procedures are held, and point out the coordinator or tell how to contact him or her. It might even be possible to make the quality policy constantly available to every employee through the use of tattoos. It’s also a good idea to subtly suggest that any employee who causes a finding will be docked a day’s pay, for example. That will ensure the peons are on their toes.
When the audit is over you will review the final list of findings with the auditors. This your opportunity to express your mea culpas, minimize the severity of the findings (you’re prepared if you created them in the first place), and help the auditors feel like they did their jobs. At worst you’ll have a short list of issue to fix. When the auditors check back in 30 days you will have those all cleared up, and soon you’ll be joining that elite crowd of companies who achieved major quality certifications (and can brag about it).
Luckily for you, quality certifications are widely misunderstood. In the end, quality standards like ISO9001 only mean that you know what kind of “stuff” you make and sell, and that you can make stuff of the same quality level on an ongoing basis. They do NOT mean that any customer knows what quality of stuff they are getting from you, but they create the impression that your products are better than those of competitors who are not certified – a decided marketing advantage, which is what quality certification is all about anyway.
CMMI is the latest fad in quality certifications. CMMI stands for Capability Maturity Model Integration (link), and this is a certification first developed for the software industry. It is attained in levels from 2 to 5, with 5 being the highest level attainable. While it is intended to go beyond ISO9000 by adding a requirement that process improvement processes be part of the total set of procedures used in your business, it will undoubtedly soon follow ISO9000 as a marketing advantage that is easy to obtain at low cost. Similar methods to those suggested above for ISO9000 certification can work, but this newer certification may not have as many available auditing organizations, and it may be harder to find auditors who will give you an easy pass for their fees.
The bottom line: Your company, too, can be certified to impressive-sounding quality standards just like many other successful companies, and with minimal cost and trouble. With an experienced coordinator in your employ you will soon be able to capitalize on a hot business fad and still keep an edge on your golf game as your company grows. In addition, once you have that nice certification logo on your marketing materials you can dump the coordinator and assign their responsibilities to one of your less expensive overloaded employees – an easy win.
Tags: bad management, business humor, CMMI, ISO9000, management humor, management secrets, Quality, Quality Certification
December 17, 2008 at 3:25 pm |
Ineed for my self certification help me
December 18, 2008 at 4:45 am |
Merghany – you could google ISO9001 and learn more about this topic, but this blog contains purposefully BAD management advice designed to amuse. This NOT a self-help site for any certification. I wish you the best of luck. – Tim
January 1, 2009 at 6:20 pm |
Tim,
Great article. You make astute, yet pitiful, observations. However, you didn’t mention another tremendous group of TQM related certifications which also have nearly limitless marketing potential – and are easily and inexpensively “adapted” by marketers. I’m referring to the whole series and hierarchy of belts related to Six Sigma. Since the US automotive firms have mandated suppliers train and retain Six Sigma Black Belts, we’ve seen a crop of re-tooled consultants hit the market claiming new insights to fairly straightforward Six Sigma concepts; they do this, I’m certain, to distinguish themselves from the now humdrum claims and teachings of practitioners who’ve been preaching the same message about Six Sigma since the mid 80’s. My frustration grows as, I’ll state the obvious here, I see these consultants simply repackaging SS terms, belt schemes, tools, and even the statistics to fabricate perceived value through individualism. If the fundamentals of math or applied statistics changed in the last twenty years, I was asleep.
As you know, I am currently or have been for many years a TQM practitioner and am a firm believer in derivable value from quality system standards, (CMM, ISO9001 and its tougher cousin TS16949, as well as ISO14000, etc.), organizational assessment tools such as Malcolm Baldrige, and tool sets like Six Sigma. But, I’m still amazed and genuinely angered by short-sighted management teams who truncate implementation and even falsify output from any of the above systems and tools. Cleaning up process output data as unethical as lending money to someone you know is probably unable to repay it. Even worse than the practice of a making high risk loans, is the institutionalized grown cousin – which is the practice of independent third party financial auditors ignoring obvious financial risks to stockholders and hiding behind GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) yet still certifying their clients’ financial reporting practices in annual reports. In my opinion, GAAP is the root cause of this other whole financial mess because if a shady practice is “generally accepted” then it’s okay for everyone to follow any given practice or set of criteria. This, I believe is how we get to industry, national and even linked international system-level financial meltdowns.
[I asked in an email to Senator Carl Levin why the accounting auditors weren’t being held responsible for obscuring financial risks in annual reports of AIG and other key players in the recent sub-prime scam, but only got a form letter response explaining in detail why the senator voted for the first bailout. I’m sure their financial gains are all somehow linked through juicy government contract selections and other “network” advantages.]
In automotive circles, we’ve seen how programs for ISO9001, QS9000, TS16949 and now CMM (for software development teams) and Six Sigma have been taught by the unqualified, internalized by the incompetent and usually under funded, and lauded to customers by the unscrupulous. In almost every instance, OUTPUT VALUE is severely reduced or completely eliminated.
At my employer, I’ve recently seen how US managers lose jobs because they refuse to revise production defect information as reported to our customers and, I’m proud to be among those ethical managers impacted. Even more surprising is how this same employer spent ~$30,000 to send three of us to one of the best Six Sigma training organizations (taught by Scott Lasater formerly of GE and who is widely credited with teaching Jack Welch Six Sigma) yet hasn’t accepted even one project of over 25 candidate projects submitted by managers and VPs within the last three months – just amazing. I’m convinced that the executives are afraid the scrutiny of Six Sigma process investigations will unearth embarrassing practices and probably more data manipulations. Nobody likes embarrassing, fact-based realities, especially little executives with fragile, even juvenile egos.
January 2, 2009 at 3:15 pm |
Those are great observations and insights, John. Thanks so much for your comment.
I realize I didn’t include Six Sigma and similar pursuits in this entry, mostly because they don’t involve certifications and related audits. I completely agree that the “Sick Sigma” efforts I’ve seen, even among companies who made a practice of implementing most of the projects that resulted, were little beyond repackaged TQM efforts with added human-political trappings around who can be a black belt and who can be a green belt, for instance.
Regarding Six Sigma and similar programs I have to observe that, if a company isn’t internalizing the system and improvements it suggests, then it is just a band aid that distracts the organization from the real job of satisfying customers. People like W. Edwards Deming (as well as our own experiences) taught us that if TQM isn’t a way of business life, it is a waste of time, and no amount of shallow labeling or sketchily-acquired certifications will make anything better – quite the opposite in most cases. The finding published in Business Week (I think) some years ago reporting that Six Sigma-adopting companies showed lower returns than companies that didn’t adopt SS was telling. Still, it appears that many if not most company executives, at least in the US, failed to pick up on that important study.
I’m sure there are worse examples of companies embracing standards, certifications, and improvement systems in dysfunctional ways, and I’d like to hear them (especially because many of them are so ludicrous as to make me laugh – sadly, albeit). I’d enjoy it if we could record more awful stories of clueless management and at least mildly self-destructive business practices here. (There are plenty to go around, I believe.)
Thanks again, John, for your excellent comment. You have me thinking about book collaborations with titles like “Crash and Burn: How Inept Management Makes (Made) a Mockery of the Total Quality Movement”.
April 15, 2009 at 2:38 pm |
Not that I’m totally impressed, but this is a lot more than I expected for when I found a link on Delicious telling that the info is quite decent. Thanks.