The Process Approach to ISO 9001: 2015 Certification

Editor's note: this transcript was generated by AI and has been lightly edited for clarity and relevance — some sections have been shortened or removed, and minor transcription errors corrected.

Full transcript

00:01:26Michael Cousins

My name is Michael Cousins, I'm the founder of Triaster. We've been in business for just over 20 years, and since day one we've been a pure-play process improvement company. We spend our day-to-day lives helping clients document their processes, improve their processes, or incorporate their processes into a quality or business management system.

00:04:09Michael Cousins

The process approach is universally applicable — a tried-and-tested method that can go across businesses, large or small, anywhere in the world. Every organisation is a set of processes that can be modelled as interactions between trigger points and delivery points — customer orders to customer delivery, supplier invoices to supplier payment, and so on.

00:05:30Michael Cousins

The process approach is not new. The term "process" has been in use for decades. Deming said, "If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." That would have been in the '60s or '70s.

00:08:27Michael Cousins

In the '80s and '90s, technology enablers emerged — email, desktop diagramming packages, the internet and intranet — that allowed organisations to remodel themselves to be more efficient. First Direct was one of the first banks in the UK to offer phone-based banking, a complete transformation. Michael Dell transformed the hardware supply industry by not building a PC until an order was placed.

00:09:56Michael Cousins

Hammer and Champy wrote about process re-engineering concepts being exploited by organisations at the time, delivering wide-scale change and massive improvements. We saw the emergence of technology enablers, forward-thinking businesses re-engineering as early adopters of the process approach, and then ISO adopted the whole thing shortly after.

00:11:14Michael Cousins

The word "process" is defined in the ISO standard as a set of interrelated or interacting activities that transforms its inputs into its outputs. Triaster has built its entire approach on this basic core definition.

00:12:57Michael Cousins

Whatever you're using to document processes, separate clearly the activities from the inputs and outputs — describe activities always with a verb, and inputs and outputs always with a noun. If you adopt that basic discipline, you'll very quickly find this opens up avenues of analysis that previously would have been a little blurred.

00:14:25Michael Cousins

In order to improve a process, we need to understand how long it takes, how much it costs, and so on. Once you've separated your activities from your inputs and outputs, you're able to explore the activities from a business analysis perspective — costs, resources, time, risk.

00:16:08Michael Cousins

I favour a simple risk matrix model — a one-to-five score of likelihood of occurrence, and a one-to-five score of impact. Something that happens frequently with high impact scores 25; something infrequent with minimal impact scores 1.

00:18:39Michael Cousins

The second aspect is predicting change. Once you have some understanding of the performance characteristics of your current, as-is process, you can model the to-be, or possible future states, in the computer — and let it run through thousands of instances to come up with statistics that support your business case for change, rather than needing to actually change the process for real, which is costly and fraught with risk.

00:20:41Michael Cousins

I'd encourage focusing on the process cycle efficiency — the proportion of value-added tasks in your processes — as a key metric. Ideally, you'd want that to go up every time you introduce change.

00:22:38Michael Cousins

My personal perspective is to focus process work on the customer interface — the key processes are the ones that matter most to your customers. Within each, make sure you understand the customer's requirements and can guarantee they're met every time. That should form the basis of your quality management system.

00:25:52Michael Cousins

The elements of the standard that appeal to us most are all to do with the processes — the capture, the improvement, and the communication of them. But there's a whole load of other things that are relevant around leadership and risk management too.

00:26:16Michael Cousins

I personally favour Plan-Do-Check-Act very heavily. Around any kind of implementation of standards or improvement projects, if you do nothing else, that whole life cycle of improvement will really help you move forward — constantly testing your assumptions.

00:27:24Michael Cousins

Part of what the process approach means is establishing the processes you have and getting them to operate as an integrated, complete system — not just a diagrammatic flow of activities, but a rich body of documentation incorporating roles, responsibilities, metrics, risks, and working documents.

00:32:00Michael Cousins

In terms of where processes sit within the overall quality management system: I don't see them as separate things, one sitting within the other. The process approach and the QMS are one and the same thing in many ways — with the clients we work with, there is no distinction. The processes are the first port of call, and from the processes, one links down into the supporting documentation. We tend to find the more processes you adopt, the fewer procedures are necessary — there's less documentation required, the more processes you put in the system.

00:34:10Michael Cousins

Generally, the feedback from ISO 9001 auditors is very positive, because the approach they recommend is precisely the approach we deliver — this separation of noun and verb, and the ability to associate metadata in the processes with the clauses of the standard. Generally, by and large, the feedback is good.

00:35:15Michael Cousins

What are the downsides of the process approach? I don't think there are any. Like anything of value, there has to be an investment of time and resource, and it requires a mindset change if it hasn't been done before — but apart from the challenge existing and needing to be addressed, I don't think there is a downside. I've yet to see it not work, and I've yet to see it not deliver benefits.