Mission Creep

I was working yesterday on a quality audit at a small manufacturing company. If you have ever wondered what the sign  'ISO9000' means on a brochure or a company website, it means that the company works to a defined quality system and has been audited against it by an independent inspector. Impressive stuff!


What it actually means in practice is that on a regular basis, usually once a year, someone turns up and checks that the company in question is doing what their procedures manual says they are doing.

It sounds simple enough, and in general it usually is.  But the company I was with yesterday failed.  This was quite surprising because they had passed every previous one since they joined the scheme 8 years ago.  And the reason was rather interesting.

At some point in the previous year a member of staff had decided to improve the quality standard by recording some data that had previously been generated when it was needed, but subsequently discarded.  They had done this for a period of time and then lost interest and stopped.  The inspector found the records and concluded that the system was not being followed and so failed them.  To get their certificate they now need to start working the system and provide the data to prove that they have indeed changed their ways.

Looking at it from the outside this struck me as a classic bit of mission creep.  The whole purpose of systems and procedures is to make sure that the company operates efficiently and therefore profitably,  It isn't about producing data, unless producing that data contributes to the profitability of the company. In this case, I am pretty confident that the data that they now have to record does not in fact do this.

The language of quality assurance is a minefield for mission creep. It always seems as if documenting things is a good thing in its own right and that specifying things and tightening tolerances are virtues that are self rewarding.  This is not the case.  If you can't see a clear way to how an activity is making money, you have to ask yourself why you are doing it.  Probe deeply when doing this.  Things sometimes have subtle benefits that aren't immediately obvious.

But ultimately, if you are doing something that doesn't contribute to the true goal of making money then stop doing it.

photo credit: Why doesn't anyone read the signs? via photopin (license)