Phew. Good to get last week over with. The QMS Lead Auditor Course ticked all the boxes with the IRCA and we can now declare it officially registered. It was an interesting week. You know the way things are with an initial trial run, but as this “product” is actually a “service“, the course approval process (as nobly executed by the IRCA) required a degree of subtlety and judgment that is not always a feature of auditing in an engineering or manufacturing discipline. Thankfully our reviewing officer was comfortable with the dynamics of service delivery, but that can’t be said for all auditors

Auditing for effectiveness rather than strict conformance
These techniques are not synonymous.  Sometimes results and methods are critical, sometimes only the results. That means sometimes we can tolerate variations in the process, different people using different methods to achieve the right result. Comfortable with that? No? What’s that? Why can’t methods be standardised whatever the process? Well, here’s the answer

Sometimes we can have absolute certainty about the process we need to see followed, but that can only be achieved when we can control the consistency of the inputs. A lot of manufacturing processes are like that. We can feed a consistent standard of material into the process, control all the mechanised and non-mechanised process parameters and require that every repetition is executed just so. No problem there. Sometimes however we just can’t control the consistency of input, particularly when the input may be a person (like in a training course). They’re all different. They learn at different rates, work at different rates, ask different questions and so on. That means that no two training courses can run the same way. It’s not just that variation in the process is tolerated, it is an absolute requirement if we are to achieve the right result

A changing world asks for different approaches
Some of our fundamental quality principles are being shaken up a bit. Not destroyed, but shaken. None more so than the cornerstone of TQM, PDCA. Hear us out
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