We work with quality management systems every day, but where do they come from? Usually we treat them as a part of the landscape, like city streets, that tell us how to get from here to there. No, you can’t just say that your new product is released: first you fill out this form, then call a meeting with these people, and finally collect those signatures. As a set of instructions, it’s not too different from: Take this street three blocks, then turn right at the stoplight for another four blocks. Pull into the parking just after the coffee shop.

But the streets were laid out according to a plan. Someone had to decide how to organize the city—on a square grid? in concentric rings?—before any land was graded or any asphalt poured. So what about our quality management systems? What plan or organizing principles were they built on?

For systems based on the ISO 9001 standard, we can answer that question exactly because the fundamental principles are all spelled out in the companion document ISO 9000. There are seven of them, as follows:

• Customer focus
• Leadership
• Engagement of people
• Process approach
• Improvement
• Evidence-based decision making
• Relationship management

Let’s look at these principles a little closer, to see what they mean in real life.

Customer focus

Customer focus is the first principle because customer satisfaction is the most basic goal of quality. Customer complaints are a clear sign of quality problems. And if you treat your customers badly they will take their business elsewhere. Two obstacles can make this focus harder than it looks.

First, it’s not always obvious who your customers are: the people who pay for the product, or the people who use it? Sometimes those are different; if they are, you have to think about the right way to satisfy each group. Also, you may have to satisfy other parties too: landlords, city hall, and so on. Each requires attention.

Second, sometimes you can get so wrapped up in your own internal procedures that you lose sight of your customer. One way to tell is to watch the path taken by a single order, from the time it comes in until you deliver the product or service and close the order. How many people touch it? How many desks does it cross? If the number is too large, that’s a problem. There’s no foolproof cure for this condition, so watch for it.

Leadership

Leadership is unavoidable in any organization of even moderate complexity, because somebody has to make decisions. Do we steer left or right? Do we paint it red or green? Who will be out front pulling, and who will be in back pushing? And so on.

At the same time, when the work is even a little complex, leadership has to be decentralized because nobody knows everything. The Boss might know marketing or finance; but if so, he probably doesn’t know about logistics or cybersecurity. (Maybe it’s vice versa.) The answer is to hire people who know these things and then listen to them. No good boss tries to make all the decisions alone.

There’s a funny thing about leadership, which is that every organization reflects the personalities of its leaders. If the Boss is always in a hurry, the organization will rush and cut corners; if the Boss winks at minor infractions, the organization will sign off on major defects. Conversely, if you want a quality culture, just make sure your leaders care passionately about quality. The attitude will percolate through like magic.

Engagement of people

Engagement is the flip side of leadership. Leadership gives the organization a will, by making decisions; but the membership gives the organization hands, to carry out those decisions and get things done. And without engagement, the membership will just wander away to work somewhere else.

How do you engage your people? There are libraries of books on this, but everyone knows the basics. Pay them fairly. Treat them fairly. Communicate clearly what you want. Show them why it matters. Let them feel your enthusiasm for a job well-done. Go to bat for them. As W. Edwards Deming famously said, "Drive out fear."

Why do you do these things? It’s not just that your people might quit, though they might. But unengaged employees are distracted. So if they can trust you to treat them fairly and protect them from trouble, that eliminates distractions. It lets them focus. And when you focus on your work, you produce better quality.

Process approach

The day you start work in quality, you hear about "the process approach." It runs all through management system standards like ISO 9001. Even the simplest jobs use a process. But why?

The process approach is a way to think about work: modeling it, improving it, and correcting it. Everyone uses it because it works. Describing your work as a process helps you:

• To do things in a certain order. (To bake a cake, mix up the batter before putting it in the oven!)
• To meet a list of requirements. (If you need five pieces of documentation for a city permit, a process will make you collect all five.)
• To work with a machine. (The machine needs the same inputs each time. And it always gives you the same outputs.)
• To train others. (If they are brand-new on the job, give them a checklist.)
• To align different roles on a big job. (A process standardizes each work-package before you hand it off. That way the next station always knows what to do.)

And the process approach helps you improve performance. Once you define and measure processes you can calculate how well you are doing. Then analyze each process in detail to find opportunities to make it better.

Improvement

You need improvement because you have competitors. So even if you do a good job today, someone will figure out how to do better. To keep him from stealing your customers, you yourself have to get better. Then he sees you improve, so he does the same. And so on.

Again, there are hundreds of books on how to improve. Check them out. But remember that there is no magic key to make it happen. Plenty of approaches often work. At the same time, always listen for the whisper of inspiration that shows you things in a whole new light. Sometimes that makes all the difference.

Evidence-based decision making

It is the easiest thing in the world to be misled by wishful thinking, by what you hear from your friends, or by what you read on the Internet. But that doesn’t make the facts go away! It just means they take you by surprise.

The only way to avoid this risk is to ask for evidence. So ISO 9001 insists that any quality management system has to collect objective evidence for decisions. That’s the reason behind internal audits, behind objective quality metrics, and even behind training records. It’s also why there are rules around documents and records: so that they can be accessed later without the risk of corruption, distortion, or secret editing.

It sounds simple and obvious, but it makes a world of difference.

Relationship management

In a sense, relationship management brings us back to the beginning. We talked first about customer focus—looking after your customers. But even there we recognized that there are other parties who aren’t customers, but who need attention anyway.

The more general term is interested parties, and relationship management is broadly about your interactions with all of them. But for practical reasons the focus is usually on your suppliers.

What do your suppliers need from you? Most generally, they need you to order goods or services they can supply and they need you to pay your bills. After that, it depends on your relationship with them. Some companies find it helpful to partner with their key suppliers—even informally—by trading knowledge and expertise so that they both improve. Other companies find they need a more arms-length relationship. Figuring out which one is right for you, and then implementing it, is the job of relationship management.

The seven quality management principles aren’t magic. In many ways they sound like simple common sense. But using them together is so powerful.