Top 10 Mistakes Made by Quality Management Professionals

 

 

IBS America, Inc. asked seasoned quality and compliance management professionals what they felt as though their biggest mistakes were when first starting on the job. We combed through the most thought-provoking based on the responses we received, and have compiled this list for budding quality management professionals to take into consideration when launching their new careers.

1) Frightening people into compliance. "I think my biggest mistake was in using the Warning Letters as a beat stick, to frighten people into compliance. I was also a gunfighter, not a team builder. It worked well for a short time, but when I needed help everyone was afraid that I would 'shoot' them"

2) Not getting a concrete auditee agreement before submitting audit findings. "We had a practice of sending the draft audit report first to the auditees, then gave them some time to raise concerns - if any - due to differences in the findings briefed during the audit closure and those documented in the draft report.

After this report, findings would be logged in an internal audit management tool for formal tracking - but in one instance, I logged the findings directly and an auditee reported high dissatisfaction, claiming that such a finding was not conveyed during the Audit at all. It took many rounds of discussion to ascertain the validity of the finding. Though the auditee was convinced, too much energy was spent that could have been averted."

3) Spending too much time at one company. "My biggest mistake was working for my first employer for 18 years! Staying with a company too long can limit your rate of growth and breadth of experience. Set a time limit after which you can review the pros and cons of staying a little longer vs moving on to gain more experience from other organizations."

4) Working in organizations in which top management was not engaged in quality and really valued it. "Quality was 'necessary because customers expect a quality function'. If top management does not understand the total business value of the quality/reliability function you as a quality professional will be marginalized just as the function is."

5) Not taking any Quality Certification courses early enough in my quality career.

6) Wanting to achieve perfection in my first attempt.

7) Emphasis on putting out fires rather than finding competent staff to prevent problems. "Putting out fires tends to overwhelm a truely comprehensive QMS in many cases.

Finding competent staff and showing trust in their skill sets and experience is key to the lean quality management system (QMS) staffing available at many project builds. Staff knows when it is well led."


8) Looking for errors, and finding fault with the person who had performed the work.
"I found that no person deliberately commits a mistake. There must be faults and loose ends in the system in which they are working. I started looking for those instead, and very soon found knowledge gaps in persons due to incomplete Work Instructions (WIs), an unhealthy production quality control process, work allocation mistakes as inexperienced persons were allocated difficult projects, inadequate training, etc."

9) Trying to "boil the ocean". "Start small with focus on a pilot area or project. A quick sustained win is good for both your career and a stepping stone for the future."

10) Don't make excuses, do the hard thing and make it right. "My biggest quality mistake was as a new production supervisor one of our 'minor' pieces of equipment was not fully completing the cinch of a cable connector to the cable. It mostly held unless you pulled on the wire, but since the wire harness was covered that 'shouldn't' have happened; of course, many of the connections came open but only after shipping. It's the little things that don't look all that bad but still matter in a big way."

 

 

 

 

Posted by Ashley Osgood

Source: Anonymous Quality Management professionals on LinkedIn, 11/2011

http://info.ibs-us.com/blog/bid/48684/top-10-mistakes-made-by-quality-management-professionals?source=Blog_Email_[Top%2010%20Mistakes%20Made]

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