Improving Internal Communication as required by ISO 9001 QMS

by Denise E. Robitaille 

The nuns at St. Anthony’s Catholic school used to tell a cautionary tale of a woman who’d spread a vile bit of gossip about her neighbor. Horrified by the consequences of her actions, she went to church to confess her transgression. She explained to her priest that she regretted the gossip and wished to confess, atone for her sin and make reparation. The priest granted absolution and then assigned her the following task:

“Take a pillow and climb to the top of the steeple,” he said. “When you reach the bell tower, rip open the pillow and scatter the feathers to the wind. After you’ve finished, come back to see me.” 

The contrite penitent did as she was told. When she finished, she descended and went to the priest. “Now, go and gather all the feathers,” he told her.

“But that would be impossible,” she exclaimed. “I could never find them all.” 

“That’s true,” he replied. “In the same way, it’s impossible for you to fully repair the damage that your gossip has done.”

This parable demonstrates both the intricacy of communication and the exponential consequences of losing control over this fundamental element of our shared humanity. What we say (or don’t say), the care with which we target our listener, the veracity of the content and the accountability we assume for the actions that ensue are all issues that we must control. 

The costs of inadequate communication

 
Communication is the means by which we inform one another, give instructions, exchange ideas, grant permission, conduct commerce, shout warnings and express satisfaction, etc. Implicit in any of our verbal or written interchanges is a presumption that the information is reliable both in substance and authority. We must be confident that we can trust the message and that the person who composes it is both qualified to communicate the message and in some way accountable for its content. 

Well-controlled communications are accurate, timely, complete, directed to all appropriate or required recipients, and crafted in a way that’s understood by the intended audience. 

Communications are incomplete until the recipient confirms that the messages have been received. They’re of limited value if the recipient doesn’t fully comprehend what’s being communicated, and they’re worse than useless if the information is wrong.

Within the context of ISO 9001 QMS, failing to control internal communication engenders the following risks:

• Incorrect information might be disseminated.
• Updated information might not be available in a timely manner.
• Information might be correct and timely but inaccessible.
• Interested parties might be inadvertently omitted from a distribution  list.
• Recipients might misunderstand or misinterpret what’s being communicated.

Examples of probable outcomes from these failures include:

• A customer’s concession to a deviation never gets acted upon.
• The latest revision of a specification doesn’t go to production.
• Modified quality objectives aren’t shared with employees.
• Revised safety protocols aren’t implemented.
• Material is purchased from a disqualified supplier.
• Operators miss an important training session.
• Customer complaints don’t get appropriate attention.
• New-product rollout is delayed because of multiple miscommunications.

The ultimate consequence in all instances is a breakdown of one or more processes that will adversely affect your ability to fulfill customer requirements. In some cases, poor communication guarantees you’ll ship the customer the wrong item or fail to make on-time delivery.

If you don’t control your internal communications, you don’t know where messages are going. You lose the means of knowing what actions were taken by those who received your messages. You have no way of tracing or retrieving them if the information is wrong. You don’t know if the data originated from a reliable or authorized source. And you can’t even be sure that everyone is hearing the same thing.

Failing to establish effective internal communication creates a systemic breakdown comparable to a problem with your document control process or any other feature that pervades your organization. For example, the relationship between communication and document control is that the documentation describes the requirement, and communication is the conduit for getting it to the appropriate process owner. If you have problems with document control, you could communicate the wrong specification. The input to your communication process is directly influenced by the data’s integrity; therefore, you must ensure that the content is factual.

The other aspect of communication to consider is the relationship between sender and receiver. A message’s author is responsible for ensuring that the intended audience will understand the language and format. He or she must also make the message accessible. Posting an important notice on a server that only a small population is authorized to access is nearly equivalent to not communicating at all.

Establishing appropriate channels

 
In order for an organization to control its internal communications adequately, there must be consensus as to process, protocols, authorizations and records.

How do you communicate a change to a customer order? Who has the authority to tell you to change your production schedule? Who must know about a revision to a subassembly? Who lets salespeople know if a customer’s order will be late? How does the company ensure that all affected functions sign off on the organization’s capacity to service a new contract? Whom do you tell about customer complaints? Where and when do people go for companywide notifications?

Clause 5.5.3, Internal communication, is one of the important requirements in ISO 9001. Good internal communication has always been a prerequisite for organizational efficiency--especially across departmental boundaries.

It is not necessary to write a procedure about how you control internal communications. However, it is required that communications relevant to your quality system activities are adequately controlled to facilitate the fulfillment of organizational goals. Your communications conduits must work for you. 

For the purpose of your ISO 9001 registration, it’s your registrar’s responsibility to assess the implementation of your internal communication methods as they relate to your company’s quality policy, objectives and procedures. It must be evident to the auditor that your mechanisms for communicating information are consistently applied, adequately controlled and effective.

A typical question might be, “Does the e-mail system for schedule change notifications work?” To answer that, an auditor might look upstream for issues that prompted a schedule change and then look downstream to see if they were resolved in a timely manner. 

For example, a customer might have sent an e-mail stating, “Switch purchase orders 22345 and 22361 on the schedule because we’ve had a change in projections.” Your accepted protocol is to e-mail the scheduler, flag the message as urgent and wait for a confirmation. The auditor would follow the trail from the customer request to the evidence indicating what was ultimately shipped out. If the schedule wasn’t revised soon enough to switch the orders, the customer probably didn’t get the needed parts. 

Conversely, if things happened as requested, there’s verification that the company has adequate control of this particular communication conduit. This is one of many examples of using an alternative to a documented procedure to define and control a process.

Communication as process

 
Communication is a process. In keeping with the process approach, it’s appropriate to apply the inherent concepts of input and output to this group of activities. The input is the information that creates the need for the communication. The nature of the information determines the method and flow. The output of the process is the successful transmission. The message content creates input for the next step in the series of processes. If the input (i.e., message) is, “Part X73 is going to be late; skip to the next job,” then the output (or response) might be: “OK, confirmed. Will post Job 4876 next.” The messages’ traceability ensures that requirements--even when they change frequently in a volatile market--are controlled and effectively communicated. 

When you consider internal communication as a process, you can begin to ascribe to it some of the same features you apply to other quality management system processes. Let’s look at them individually. 

Definition 

 
Consider the methods and nature of your communications. Types of communications might include:

 

• Customer concessions
• Changes to work instructions
• Revisions to customer specifications
• Rescheduling
• Project status
• Training requirements
• Objectives
• Process deviations
• Changes to supplier qualifications
• Personnel assignment
• Segregation of material

The methods you’ll use to communicate are equally diverse and might include:
Color-coding or other nonverbal status indicators

 

• Signatures
• E-mails
• Meetings
• Bulletin/white boards
• Engineering change notice forms
• Internal audits
• Lockout/tag-out protocols
• Memos
• Physical placement (e.g., finished goods on marked shelf)
• Newsletters
• Threaded discussions
• Tags

Even if you don’t have a defined procedure, you must have consensus on the communication conduits. Designers must know where on the server they can consistently find the latest updates to customer specifications. Operators must demonstrate consistent awareness that a red tag means a job has been rejected and a yellow one means it’s awaiting inspection. Employees must know that the cafeteria bulletin board is where they sign up for training sessions. Whatever communication method you use must be uniformly practiced in order to be adequate and effective.

Responsibility 

Who’s responsible for making sure information gets to the appropriate recipients? Who’s authorized to initiate certain messages, such as production schedule changes? Who must receive the information? Does the recipient have to respond? Who should archive the messages? Who handles your e-mail system? 

Resources

Does the organization provide the means for effective communication to occur? Are there bulletin boards, adequate access to computer terminals or e-mail, suggestion boxes or readily available forms? Sometimes breakdowns occur simply because the organizational culture doesn’t foster communication. People must be able to express concerns and ideas as well as information. Are supervisors intimidating or inaccessible? 

Training

Do people know how to use the e-mail system? Do they know how to use the various forms that are utilized to communicate requirements? Do they know who to ask if they don’t understand the nature of a message? Do people know the protocol or rules for contacting people at other facilities or remote locations? Does the company offer tuition assistance for “English as a second language” courses?

Implementation and verification

 
Do your employees consistently use the established methods to communicate? Are they communicating at all? 

It’s necessary to verify that the process is effective in fulfilling the requirement.

 
As described earlier, it’s possible to assess the extent to which communication methods are working by reviewing a message’s outcome and determining if it resulted in the desired action. If the document revision got to the operator, if the supervisor confirmed that the equipment maintenance schedule was updated or if the customer’s complaint was acted upon in a timely manner, then you have verification that your internal communication process is effective.

Records

 
The same rules apply to this process as to any other. Records of requisite communications provide evidence. The ability to produce an amended contract, for example, isn’t just a good QMS practice; it can also be the means of avoiding litigation. Records of communications can also help you understand problems and breakdowns. When doing a root cause analysis, it’s helpful to know when messages were sent and to whom. It might be that the revised requirements were sent but weren’t available to the person who needed them. Or there might have been a delay with a communication. If there’s a misunderstanding about the message, a record affords you the opportunity to reassess the format and improve the way you craft subsequent communications. 

Words into goals 

 
Internal communication is the link between requirements and the people who must fulfil them. Commitment to consistent and effective communication is one of the tools you use to empower individuals to fulfil organizational goals.

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STRATEGIC QUALITY PLANNING AND DEPLOYMENT:

By Joseph A. De Feo 

Strategic quality planning (SQP) is a systematic approach to defining long-term business goals, including goals to improve quality and the means (i.e., the plans) to achieve them. Many organizations have created a vision “to be the best,” toward a goal of outperforming competitors. Many of these organizations fall short in achieving this vision. Most do not align, or have difficulty aligning, their performance excellence initiatives like lean and Six Sigma to the annual business plan. This leads to lack of resources to complete projects, which in turn makes them hard to justify.

To achieve a vision it is necessary to align the annual goals to your major change initiatives or quality programs and integrate them into the strategic plan. This will ensure the new focus becomes part of the plan and sustainable.

Japanese quality leaders refer to this process as hoshin kanri or “policy deployment. Ho, shin, kan, and ri are actually four words that loosely translate to “focus, direction, alignment, and reason.”

Focus by creating goals that provide direction and alignment of the resources needed from the organization to meet those goals and the reasons for selection them. The reasons force management to understand why it is selecting these goals.

The potential benefits of strategic quality planning and deployment include:

• Clarification of goals
• Achievability of goals
• Scheduled reduction of chronic wastes and improved quality of products and services
• Better or new focus on customers

Strategic quality planning is the systematic process by which an organization defines its long-term goals with respect to quality and customers, and integrates them into a cohesive business plan. It enables an organization to execute organizational breakthroughs to achieve a competitive advantage and quality leadership.

The approach to providing organization wide financial goals has evolved into a more robust strategic plan, incorporating these goals into a hierarchy that includes the voice of the customer. A structured methodology must include a provision of rewards, universal participation, a common language, and training.

Launching a strategic plan

Creating a strategic plan requires that leaders be personally involved, eliminating the atmosphere of blame, and making decisions on the best available data. The strategic deployment process requires incorporating the customer focus. The elements needed are generally alike for all organizations. The ones in most widespread use tend to be:

• Mission
• Vision
• Values
• Policy

The mission is the reason for the organization’s existence. The vision is the desired future state of the organization. Values are what the organization stands for, and they tie into strategies, which are the means to achieve the vision. Policies represent a guide to managerial action, guiding day-to-day decision-making. And finally, the deployment plan is what turns vision into action.

Developing the plan

Strategic deployment begins with a customer-focused vision, which should define the benefits that can be expected. Good vision statements should be compelling and shared throughout the organization. But vision statements are only words—a reminder of what the organization is pursuing, which must be carried out through actions. When forming a vision, it’s important not to focus exclusively on shareholders, to properly explain the vision to everyone involved, and not to create a vision too easy or difficult to achieve.

A mission is often confused with a vision, but a mission statement should clarify an organization’s purpose. Together, a vision and mission provide an agreed-upon direction, which can be used as a basis for decision-making.

To convert the vision into an achievable plan, it must be broken into key strategies. Responsibility for them must be distributed to key executives. To determine what the strategies should be, five areas must be assessed:

• Customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Costs related to poor quality of products or processes
• Organization’s culture
• Business processes
• Competitive benchmarking

Each of these areas can form the basis for a balanced business scorecard. The key strategies can be modified to reflect long-term goals. An organization must set specific strategic goals that must be achieved for the broad strategy to be a success. Seven areas must be addressed to ensure that the proper goals are established:

• Product performance
• Competitive performance
• Business improvement
• Cost of poor quality
• Performance of business processes
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty and retention

Goals that affect product salability and revenue generation should be based primarily on meeting or exceeding marketplace quality. A widely used basis for setting goals has been historical performance.

Corporate values reflect an organization’s culture. Some organizations create value statements to further define themselves. Values are what an organization stands for, and must be supported with actions from management lest their publication create cynicism.

Policy declarations are a necessity during a period of major change. Most declare the intention to meet the needs of customers, and include language relative to competitiveness in quality. Some include specific reference to internal customers, or indicate that the improvement should extend to all phases of the business. Enforcement of new policies is a problem due to the relative newness of documented quality policies. Sometimes, an audit process is mandated to ensure the policy is carried out.

A fundamental step in establishing any strategic plan is the participation of upper management. The executives are responsible for ensuring all business units have a similar council at the subordinate levels of the organization. If a council is not in place, the organization should create one.

Once the strategic goals have been agreed upon, they must be subdivided and communicated to lower levels. Those who are assigned responsibility must determine the needed resources and communicate this to higher levels. The deployment process starts by identifying the needs of the organization.

Measuring progress

There are several reasons why an organized approach to measuring performance is necessary:

• Performance measures indicate the degree of accomplishment of objectives
• Performance measures are needed to monitor the improvement process
• Performance measures are required for periodic reviews by management

Once goals have been broken down into sub-goals, key measures need to be established. The best measures of the strategic planning process are simple, quantitative, and graphic. As goals are set and deployed, the means to achieve them must be analyzed to ensure they satisfy the objective they support. Once the system is in place, it must be reviewed periodically to ensure that goals are being met.

A formal, efficient review process will increase the probability of reaching the goals. The review process looks at gaps between what has been achieved and the target. Frequent measurements of progress displayed in graphic form help identify the gaps in need of attention. Success in closing those gaps depends on a formal feedback loop with clear responsibility and authority for acting on those differences.

Pursuing too many objectives at the same time will dilute the results. Trying to plan without adequate data can create an unachievable plan. If leaders delegate too much, there will be a lack of direction. The biggest disruption caused by strategic planning is created by imposing a structured approach on those who prefer not to have it. Resistance will be evident at the outset. Therefore, the most important prerequisite is the creation of an environment conducive to change.

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