Past Articles from Executive Briefing
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Risk
ISO 9000
Audit
Customer Satisfaction
Training
Business Improvement
Risk
Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 – Intersecting Risk Management with Compliance Management
Recently, Quality Award Partners® Managing Director Jeff Ryall completed an assignment with the Australian arm of an international software development company in the finance & insurance industry. The task was to provide all staff with an understanding of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002, and its implications for the business and product.
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When Risk Management Isn’t Enough
The conventional approach to risk management, based on AS4360 is well known. You can download this process from Quality Award Partners’ website at http://www.qap.com.au/risk/risk-process.htm. However there are situations when this isn’t enough to ensure successful outcomes.
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Management Systems: The Key to Effective Risk Management
…the fundamental organisational component of management systems is the key to managing our risk obligations.
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Risk & Compliance management and its relationship to value
Tools that can deliver a deeper view into an organisation’s ability to comply with standards and legislation also act as a window into the very core of how the company operates.
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‘Mundane’ risks drive business continuity
planning
While businesses worldwide are being reminded
of the risks posed by terrorism, it is the more mundane – and
likely – problems of power outages and system failures
that are driving companies to implement business continuity
plans.
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Rail smashes offer system insights
After two serious railway
crashes in Australia, it is worth reflecting that the conventional
hierarchical structure
of an organisation is said to have been introduced to industry
from a military model because of a train smash.
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Identifying Systems Risk as a key to Adverse Event Prevention
This paper was presented in June 2001, at the annual
conference of Australian Association for Quality in Healthcare,
around the theme of Quality in the Health Industry, where
Deanne Emmerson of Quality Award Partners Pty Ltd, was
a keynote speaker…
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ISO 9000
Managing Corporate Knowledge
What is Corporate Knowledge? Simply put, it is knowledge that belongs to the company. If the knowledge is recorded, it is called Explicit Knowledge. If it is simply in people’s heads, it is known as Tacit Knowledge.
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Document Control – It's all about risk!
One of the great aspects about ISO 9001 is that it is totally management systems focussed and risk centred. It also follows the cycle of due diligence in terms of compliance, delegation and deployment and monitoring, review and reporting. This helps us enormously in that it assists organisations to develop robust systems of management that are centred around all stakeholders and their protection.
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Unpacking Calibration
Calibration – potentially the most complex part of ISO 9001. This article looks at what’s OK and what’s not.
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Lean Management Systems
In the early days of Management Systems, almost every activity finished up in the Quality Manual. As the standard evolved, it became more flexible, but not all systems developers took advantage of this. As a result, many organisations have Management Systems that are unnecessarily large and costly to maintain.
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‘Quality of management’ the major complaint:
survey
Research conducted nearly 80 years ago could help organisations
overcome the widespread employee dissatisfaction that recent
surveys have uncovered, according to a management consultant
who has set up an academy based on the theories.
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ISO 9001:2000….The Changes
Well, it's arrived at last. The update to the ISO 9000
series of standards was released late 2000, after a couple
of 'false starts', in which the draft documents
were published as interim standards. If you started to modify your system
based on one of these, you will find that the final release
version is different
in a number of significant ways…
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ISO 9001:2000 - Making the Transition (Part 1)
Once you
have reviewed the changes to the new standard, it can
really look like a lot of work to amend your current
system to address the new requirements. The whole structure
of the standard has changed, and there seems to be so
many new requirements that it can appear overwhelming…
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ISO 9001:2008
The ISO 9001 standard is in the final stages of revision. Now is the time to consider the implications for your organisation.
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Audit
Why Aduditing by risk is the most meaningful approach
When we consider any process, it will contain risks of various kinds. They can be risks of a quality, safety, environmental, or financial nature, each type affecting a different stakeholder. However, for many, the audit approach does not reflect this fact.
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The Case for Outsourcing your Internal audits
Traditionally, organisations have resourced their internal audits for Quality, Safety & Environmental systems by taking the words in the standard literally. Internal staff are (usually) sent off to training courses to find out how to conduct audits. Then they are deployed to the task upon their return.
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Auditing customer feedback in quality systems
Assessment of customer feedback processes is a significant feature of ISO 9001: 2000, and the level of satisfaction that is determined is the ultimate test of the integrity of the system. The auditor not only should be alert for indications of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction that could serve as inputs to the audit of the customer feedback process, but should also have sufficient understanding of marketing processes to be able to consider a broad variety of feedback methods, and assess their reliability.
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The use and abuse of audit checklists
Quality system auditing is sometimes derided as a “tick and flick” exercise, in which an auditor uses a checklist to guide the audit. This has been debated often in the quality profession and business community.
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Linking an audit of a task, activity or process to the
whole quality system
The auditor should not lose sight of
the overall direction of the audit, and get side-tracked
by superfluous details.
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How much improvement is enough for quality systems?
The auditor should seek to determine if the auditee has attempted to set
objectives that establish the relationship between three factors: corporate objectives,
customer needs, and market expectations.
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The art of demonstrating compliance with a standard
When
assessing conformity to the standard, audit checklists may
not be sufficient. At the end of an audit, the auditor should
be in a position to know whether all requirements of the standard are satisfied or not.
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Understanding the process approach to quality systems
The process approach concept must be so well understood
by auditors that they are not limited by the terminology
in the standard; however, auditees may use
their own “in-house” terminology.
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How to identify processes in an organisation
During the audit, the auditor should determine whether there is a problem of
difference of terminology only, or whether there is a lack of real implementation
of the process approach by the auditee.
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Determining ‘where appropriate’processes
in ISO 9001
Where the terminology used by the auditee is different to that used by the auditor,
the auditor should understand the concepts in ISO 9001:2000 using ISO 9000:2000
and make a mental or written cross reference between…
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Customer Satisfaction
The customer’s not always right
Australian business
is moving beyond the adage that the “customer
is always right” and embracing a better service principle,
according to a new survey.
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Customer Satisfaction - Old Hat or Great New Stuff?
The new quality management standard, ISO 9001:2000 requires
that organisations monitor customer satisfaction. Good
companies will turn that requirement into
a real opportunity to jump ahead of their competitors. Ordinary companies
will struggle…
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WHAT KIND OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION MONITORING?
Research by leading authors in customer focus, Whitely
and Hessan, reported that only 10% of organisations
use customer research in decision-making in any visible
way…
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Training
Survival of the misfit in a winner-take-all world
Modern
business cannot rely for its prosperity on physical or technological
advantages, but must depend on the intellect
of staff, according to a visiting Scandinavian management
academic…
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TRAINING? TOO EXPENSIVE?
Some recent research has pointed out the importance of
good training that strengthens competencies in key employees.
The research compared the results achieved by the best
of the bunch with the average. For example, they found
that the top 25% of sales people are worth in sales,
fourteen times the value of the average sales person…
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Business Improvement
Six Sigma Tips
Thinking about Six Sigma? It’s the State-of-the-Art in process improvement, but a thoughtful approach is needed to ensure return on investment.
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Business Excellence Delivers Better Outcomes
In a recent project undertaken in the textile industry by Quality Award Partners, the Baldrige Criteria for Business Excellence was applied to accelerate participating businesses to higher performance outcomes - in the areas that mattered!
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