The leadership of TC 176 is pushing members to vote for a “friendly” consultant likely to tow the official party line in heading up the revision of ISO 9001. According to an official memo issued by BSI’s Beata Mroz-Orlikowska, the committee manager for TC 176 Subcommittee 2, the controversial (and ridiculously named) “SPOTG” committee is urging members to confirm Devindra Chattergoon as the head of the ISO 9001 rewrite working group.

If that sounds slightly undemocratic, it is, but ISO has a long history of having BSI and other flunkies, acting in capacities that are not supposed to push opinions, tell members how to vote before official ballots are cast. As we reported the other day, the leadership team floated for the rewrite contains exactly ZERO actual users, and instead is dominated by private consultants such as Chattergoon. Private consultants have a financial interest in making ISO 9001 as confusing as possible, in order to sell seminars and books later.

This all but ensures that Chattergoon will take over as head of the rewrite committee. That, in turn, all but ensures the next edition of ISO 9001 will be an absolute nightmare.

Chattergoon has two main problems. First, he represents Trinidad, a nation that only has — per the last ISO Survey results — 82 (as in eighty-two) ISO 9001 certificates in total. From ISO’s alleged total of 1.2 million certificates worldwide, that represents 0.006%.

While having “developing nations” contribute to ISO standards development is important, it should also be weighed against the far greater need to have actual subject matter experts participate in drafting standards, rather than hand-picked goons (pardon the pun) who promise to do whatever ISO tells them to. This is like asking a landlocked Sahara nation desert to head up a committee on maritime shipping.

Which is Chattergoon’s second problem. He has risen quickly in the ranks due to his allegiance to Nigel Croft and the overall ISO leadership, choosing to forcefully ignore ISO’s violations of procedures when pushing the ISO 9001 rewrite, and gleefully agreeing to allow the non-elected Technical Management Board to write the content for ISO 9001, instead of actual international delegates and subject matter experts.

Worse, Chattergoon is another smug, holier-than-thou punk, who sees no problem in attacking critics online, in violation of ISO’s various policies on social media posts. With his only experience in ISO 9001 being as a private consultant — never as an actual user of the standard — I challenged Chattergoon to promise he wouldn’t use his role in TC 176 to sell books, and he refused, saying instead that he’d only make that promise if I did. But I’m not on TC 176, and Chattergoon knows that.

So the ISO 9001 rewrite — which ISO had to hold a total of six votes to finally get approved — will be led by an uninformed toady who answers, in reality, to Nigel Croft and his fellow consultants, Jose Dominguez and Lorri Hunt.

Those last two names you might remember as being key consultants to worked on the disastrous 2015 version of the standard, which is largely seen as the worst version of ISO 9001 in its entire 36-year history.

You’ll also recognize those names because just a few weeks ago, I promised that Chattergoon, Hunt, and Dominguez would be handed the rewrite roles, and that the “election” was already fixed in their favor.

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ISO 14001 Implementation