Insight, opinion and commentary for the leaders of Lean Enterprise Transformation from some of the world's leading experts.Over Assessing
March 9th, 2007 - by Mark EdmondsonA COO of a large manufacturing firm lamented to me recently about the burden of assessments. “My plant managers see less and less value with the ISO, Baldrige, and corporate assessments.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Well, there’s a corporate requirement for semi-annual ISO assessments, plus and annual Baldrige assessment for each plant. It takes so much of their staff’s time, I think they feel it pulls them away from their work.”
“The goal of assessments is to show the path for improvement. Why would your plant management feel that this would pull them away from their work?” I asked.
“That’s just their point – the plants don’t feel that the assessments are helping them to improve. They view them as a grading exercise by corporate…just another bureaucratic reporting requirement.”
We then talked about the importance of adding value during the assessment process. And why this value must be perceived by those being assessed, not just by corporate. For example, if an assessment highlights that the daily management process is not well defined, go ahead and provide some training and coaching with daily management. In other words, offer help and coaching, not just a report card.
March 10th, 2007 at 1:53 am
All organizations exist to add value to their stakeholders. But this elusive quality can mean different things to different stakeholders. Therefore an auditor should provide independent and/or objective operational analysis to:
· Examine every function, process and activity of an organizational and external value chain
· Help an organization achieve its business strategies and objectives
· Follow a systematic and disciplined approach in its assessment
· Evaluate and improve the effectiveness of risk management, control and governance processes
Remember ISO 9001:2000 requires \”effectiveness\”. This means a realisation of the following:
1. Open to interpretation. Evaluating effectiveness, risk management and internal controls varies according to how the standards and/or processes are interpreted.
2. Inconsistent application. Evaluating effectiveness, risk management and internal controls can vary among auditors.
3. Requires additional auditor skills. Value-added auditing requires profound business, process and people knowledge.
4. Possibility of additional variation. No consistent and well-established standards and protocols exist for conducting value-added audits.
Until this realisation prevails, the report card will be the order of the day!
Rob