Beware the ISO 9000

My last two posts (rants) expressed my concern over lousy customer service. Customer service isn't rocket science. You need to remember one thing: Don't treat the customer like an idiot. It's amazing how difficult a rule that is to follow. But you must remember, more than any other department, management hires the cheapest labor for customer service and hopes they get lucky.

Somewhere along the line, you've heard of ISO 9000 or ISO 9001, etc. Most companies push this as some endorsement of quality. Guess what? It ain't. In fact, despite the altruistic aims of the ISO levels, it actually guarantees the reverse, given the low grade management prevalent in the US of A. ISO 9000 is an audit that confirms that all your processes, that is, everything the company does, is documented. You can probably see where this is going. When every process is documented to the highest degree, ipso facto, you can hire any idiot to do the job, because it's all there, right? Wrong! Beware ISO 9000. It is based on the fact that repetitive motion is quality. I know a lot of people that do the same thing over and over again and it's still pretty stupid. ISO 9000 does not make any value judgements about a company's processes, it merely confirms that they are documented. A process could say to take a large foam clue bat and whack the customer and that would be perfectly fine to ISO 9000.

I am not a welcome person into any 'quality' procedure. Never will be. In the first course I ever had to take on Quality, the instructor asked us to define quality. I immediately responded that quality was getting more than you paid for. For example, if you take your car in for an oil change and all they've done is an oil change, so what? Now, if they vacuumed out your car in addition, everybody would agree that was a quality job. The instructor flatly ignored me and called on somebody else. The upshot was that quality was defined as meeting requirements. If it was pointed out that you can follow requirements and the TV set would still blow up just after the warranty period, the instructor would respond that you didn't have the correct requirements.

So essentially, all skill, craftsmanship and genuine quality is legislated out, to make room for the idiots of redefinition.

What makes this even more terrible is the people that are attracted to Quality. Generally these as the people that believe that making Powerpoint slides is actual work. At my present job, we have a Quality Leader/Kaizan Specialist on the division president's staff. Once the president dragged him down to our department because production was having difficulty with crimping connectors to cables (an actual quality problem!). The President told him that this was the perfect project for a Kaizan (a type of quality process meeting) and for him, the main Quality guy, to look into it. That was the last time we ever saw that guy. The threat of doing actual work scared the hell out of him. However, when we started having Quality training again, he was totally there, showing how good an organizer he was.

This type of person is worthless. Actually worse than worthless because they have to pay him. I believe that, if I were ever to become president of a company, I would interview every single employee and ask them one question: "How good are you at powerpoint? As soon as someone answered 'Excellent' or 'Highly Skilled', I'd immediately fire them, because, they are obviously not doing any work to help the company.