A Game of Words
As an auditor I always ask employees to tell me whether they are familiar with the company Quality Objectives or not. Obviously, I may not ask that as a straight question but rather something like this:
- How do you know if you are doing a good job?
- Has your company established any quality objectives or metrics?
However, more than once I have found that employees resonate with the company lingo which may not coincide with my typical name for things. Since I know that Objectives are one of those words, I usually ask: “Do you have any goals, metrics, or Quality Objectives”?
I remember once I went through the entire audit – a whole three days, asking employees about their goals, metrics, or objectives. I remembered even asking “do you track something, do you measure something?” But people were not able to give me an answer. Finally towards the end of the audit, one person said, “do you mean targets?” and immediately everyone was able to understand and explain in full their targets. This was a good lesson. So now when I start an audit, I always make a point to ask “What do you call your measurements? Quality objectives, metrics, goals, KPIs or targets?”
Definitions
Quality Objectives as defined by the ISO 9001 standard are ‘something sought or aimed for, related to quality”.
A goal or a target may be an actual number that you are trying to achieve in an objective, but as experience show us an objective is sometime called a goal or a target. For example:
Example 1
- Quality Objective: Reduce the number of complaints by 50%
- Goal/Target: Current level of customer complaints * 0.5
Of course that was easy for a numerical objective, however it gets fuzzier when you are dealing with non numerical objectives, for example:
Example 2
- Quality Objective: Achieve ISO 27001 certification
- Goal/Target: Achieve certification in 6 months or Achieve certification with 0 nonconformities.
As you can see from the example 2 above, it will be easy to transpose the objective and the target, while on example 1, the objective is very different from the goal or target.
KPI, which stands for Key Performance Indicator, should be an actual numeric objective, although I have seen abstract KPIs also. In my opinion a good KPI should have the following characteristics:
- A goal or target value
- A trigger point or min/max threshold
- Average
- Cumulative history
So in essence, a good well round Quality Objective will have the same components as the KPI, making a robust way to measure what is being aimed for.
Now the confusion or clarification comes into place when you are translating the objective, goal or targt into a graphical representation. So let’s keep reading for some insights into quality graphs.
Good Looking Graphs
As part of my own theories, I believe good looking graphs is another area where “Less is more”. Basically, fancy three-dimensional graphs with figurines will get no respect in front of value added graphs, where you can clearly see where you stand and where you are aiming for. Without further ado, let’s look at some good looking graphs. The first graph is simple, shows a good picture of how soon customer complaints are being closed and also where the organization went beyond the trigger. Here are the main components of this graph:
- Goal value
- Trigger value
- Data block
In essence the organization is not always meeting the goal, but yet, there is only one instance where they went above the trigger or maximum threshold.
Now let’s take a look at this other graph. This graph has a few more elements which makes it a bit more busy but also provides plenty of information.
Notice that this graph has these additional elements:
- Previous year average
- Trend line
- Corrective Action (CIP is the name used by Mireaux’ Web QMS application) for the month when the closure days went beyond the trigger.
With these two graphs which are the Quality Objectives, you can actually see what is the goal or target and also what is the trigger. The whole objectives could very well be called a KPI and serve as one of the KPIs tracked by the organization.
How many of them do you need?
So the question now is, how many quality objectives or KPIs do I need? Does ISO 9001 require that I have a minimum of 10? Or perhaps a minimum of 4 by department or process? Would more KPIs make our company look better?
The answer to all of the questions above should begin with Value Add. If you are tracking data and plotting graphs for the sake of charting, then there is absolutely no value added to your company and you may as well spend the time twilling your thumbs. ISO 9001 does not specifically require a minimum set of quality objectives. Your overall process map should give you a good idea of the areas that are important in your business and that you may want to track with the overall goal of improving your processes.
A company starting in their quality journey and perhaps going for ISO 9001 certification for the first time, need not worry about quantity of objectives or KPIs, but rather on quality. What metrics are really going to add value to the organization and actually show employees where they need to improve? In fact one of the area that is most often overlooked, is the fact that quality objectives or KPIs should be shown to employees so that they understand that the quality of their work and their overall performance contributes tremendously to the organization’s KPIs or objectives. Therefore good objectives are those that add value to the organization and that can easily reflect areas for improvement. Good examples of starting objectives are Customer Satisfaction, Customer Complaints, Employee turnaround, Uptime, etc. depending on the organization’s processes.
As the organization matures in their quality journey and the quality management system becomes more robust, then a company may decide to take on a few more objectives or KPIs. This has to be done carefully to ensure that value added is always kept in mind.
Time to put the game of words to rest
Now that we have given you the definitions for what is a quality objective, target, goal and KPI, hopefully you feel better and understand that regardless of what you call your metrics, they value is in what you track and how you present them to your employees. Remember also that good looking graphs don’t need to be busy, three-dimensional or have fancy elements. If you cannot understand them, chances are your employees can’t either and that would defeat the whole purpose of establishing objectives that your employees can be measured by or contribute to.
The whole idea of having objectives is to continually improve. So having value added objectives with graphics that represent an accurate picture of where you are, where you want to be and –where you don’t want to be, will help your organization get closer to being in the ranks of world class quality organizations.
