Posts by Jim Moran

Years ago I used to deliver training in the stores of a national chain here in Canada. Most of the material was focused on the customer: How to handle difficult customers, How to tell if a customer complaint is legitimate, How ...

"People are are most valuable asset" You've heard this a thousand times, maybe more. It's simply not true. People's involvement is our most valuable asset. If we don't tap this vast resource in our organizations, we are missing out on ...

Have you ever heard someone say, after a non-conformance has been raised, "Who screwed up?". The result? Everyone heads for the hills and tries to find someone to blame. People get defensive and the cause of the problem gets buried ...

Tip #2 – Make your audits pay: Audit by Objectives Are your Quality Objectives considered when you plan Internal Audits? One of the driving forces in a management system is the need to improve – do it faster, have fewer ...

Tip #1 – Shrink the bureaucracy How many signatures do you require to authorize your controlled documents? A number of organizations we work with have created extra work with little or no added value when they require more than 1 ...

  Building Block #10 You need to know for whose sake quality is being designed into your organization Here’s a quote from ISO 9000, clause 2.2.1 – the companion document to ISO 9001: Quality focused organizations embrace a culture that ...

Building Block #9 You need to be ready to trade off other values in favour of Quality There’s an anecdotal ‘constraint model’ in the world of Engineering: Quality – Price – Timing: pick any two. By staying focused on ‘errors ...

Building Block #8 You may need to break things down into smaller units We’ve seen the Process Approach – taking inputs, performing a number of activities and creating results that get passed on to the next stage. It’s much easier ...

Building Block #7 You need to use concepts We need to walk out of the trees and look at the forest. Details are important, but can stifle our ‘lateral’ or ‘out of the box’ thinking. We need to see the ...

Building Block #6 You need to be prepared to start over again Sometimes we just have to know when to quit, or admit that a ‘modification’ to an existing process is just not going to give us the best result. ...