Fair play to him you might think because, undaunted, next day he came back for more ...
No disrespect intended to our friend, he has a job to do implementing and interpreting the requirements in such a way that will lead his client to certification, and it is good to bounce ideas around. But some of us actually disagree with JS' assertion that ISO 9001 is "full of bad management practice", because we're not sure it is. What we will admit however is that it somehow leads to the implementation of bad management systems. Why is that?
You can't blame the registered organisations, what do they know? Generally they are seeking registration to meet some customer requirement, and if the customer says "jump" you say "how high?"
However, you CAN blame the consultants because they are paid to know better. Far be it from us to suggest that it is better for a consultant to implement a "generic system". Why on earth would anyone want to do that? Hmmm ...
However we reserve our biggest criticism for the assessors (see below) who rarely do anything to set bad interpretation straight and often appear more content to overlay an initially poor interpretation with a quite bizarre work around. There is a credibility issue here, and maybe one of competence too. How many assessors have management experience or a management background? Considering their job is to assess a "management system" how many could we realistically consider "management systems specialists?" Come on, it has to be time for the IAF and the certification bodies to grasp the nettle and add some real value to the business community. We've said it in previous posts, if the scheme is so sound how come we have to spend so much time defending it?
