{"id":14026,"date":"2017-09-05T15:02:52","date_gmt":"2017-09-05T19:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/?p=14026"},"modified":"2017-09-05T15:35:53","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T19:35:53","slug":"coto-interruptus-the-missing-iso-9001-clause-on-strategic-direction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/coto-interruptus-the-missing-iso-9001-clause-on-strategic-direction\/","title":{"rendered":"COTO Interruptus: The Missing ISO 9001 Clause on Strategic Direction"},"content":{"rendered":"

[The following is a full chapter excerpted from the book Surviving ISO 9001:2015<\/strong> by Christopher Paris. The book is available for purchase at www.survivingiso9001.com<\/a><\/strong>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

If you recall, I mentioned that the entirety of the COTO Exercise was building up to the development of a \u201cstrategic direction\u201d for the company. No, there really isn\u2019t a clause 4.5 in the standard, and technically, ISO 9001:2015 makes no firm requirement for a strategic direction at all, but instead keeps talking about it as if it were part of a movie prequel you had already seen. Specifically, ISO 9001 name-drops this concept in five places:<\/p>\n

0.3.1 The Process Approach:<\/strong> \u201cThe process <\/em>[should] achieve the intended results in accordance with the quality policy and strategic direction\u2026.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

4.1 Understanding the Organization and its Context:<\/strong> \u201cThe organization shall determine external and internal issues that are relevant to its purpose and its strategic direction\u2026.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

5.1.1 Leadership & Commitment:<\/strong> Leadership and commitment shall ensure \u201cthat the quality policy and quality objectives are \u2026 compatible with the context and strategic direction \u2026.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

5.2.1 Developing the Quality Policy:<\/strong> The quality policy must be \u201cappropriate to the purpose and context of the organization and supports its strategic direction.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

9.3.1 Management Review<\/strong>:<\/strong> \u201cTop management shall review the organization\u2019s quality management system \u2026 to ensure its \u2026 alignment with the strategic direction\u2026.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Summarizing, ISO 9001 thus invokes this idea of a \u201cstrategic direction\u201d by suggesting the strategic direction be considered five times:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \u2026 when identifying processes<\/li>\n
  2. \u2026 when identifying the issues of concern (during COTO Exercise)<\/li>\n
  3. \u2026 when developing the quality policy<\/li>\n
  4. \u2026 when developing the quality objectives<\/li>\n
  5. \u2026 as a metric to measure the overall QMS against during management review<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, if you need to have a thing in order to conduct five required steps, it helps, therefore, to ensure the thing actually<\/em><\/strong> exists<\/em><\/strong>. Having said that, since it\u2019s not a mandatory requirement, this means it can \u201cexist\u201d any way you\u2019d like, even as a set of cohesive thoughts held by the top management and communicated verbally.<\/p>\n

    \"\"SpaceX had the most elegant strategic direction; when moving from an R&D house to a full production company, Elon Musk\u2019s edict was summed up in two words: \u201cforty cores annually<\/em>.\u201d<\/a> This meant everything was adjusted to target a production goal of forty rocket cores per year: production capacity, engineering throughput, plant layout, staffing, budgeting\u2026 every single thing the company did was redesigned to \u201chit\u201d the forty core mark. When asked, anyone in the company could recite a single goal \u2013 \u201cforty cores<\/em>\u201d \u2013 and then go on to elaborate on how it affected them, in their particular department or function. Simple, elegant, and it worked.<\/p>\n

    But, as usual, SpaceX may be an outlier. Reducing your strategic direction to two words wouldn\u2019t work in most companies. So, most organizations have far more complicated strategies: perhaps to expand in one market while getting out of another, or to grow the business by 50% in a five-year period. If that sounds a lot like a quality or process objective, that\u2019s not by accident: the strategic direction should inform<\/em><\/strong> the development of the quality objectives, after all.<\/p>\n

    The strategic direction isn\u2019t binding; it\u2019s going to change over time. For SpaceX, once they\u2019ve mastered \u201cforty cores\u201d it\u2019s likely Elon will issue a new strategic direction statement, and it will probably be \u201cget my ass to Mars.\u201d So these things do change, and it\u2019s not written in stone. I do recommend writing it down, though, and my best recommendation is to put it in the records of Management Review, which we will discuss in section 9.3.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019ve found, however, that some executives don\u2019t want their plans written down for general consumption by the company employees; one of my clients was pursuing ISO 9001 as a means of making the company more attractive to potential buyers, so his strategic direction was \u201cto sell the company.\u201d He didn\u2019t want employees to get terrified and quit en masse<\/em>, so he kept this very close to the vest. In such cases, it\u2019s fine if the executive writes it down and keeps it private; there\u2019s no requirement the direction be publicized or even communicated. In such cases, it\u2019s the top management\u2019s job to ensure the direction is being met, even if the employees don\u2019t know what it is. It\u2019s a good idea to have it written down, though, if only to show an auditor, in private.<\/p>\n

    So while it\u2019s not a firm requirement, developing the strategic direction \u2013 and ensuring those five points above align with it \u2013 is a critical step in developing an ISO 9001:2015 quality system.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    An excerpted chapter from Surviving ISO 9001:2015, regarding the need to develop a “strategic direction” despite ISO 9001 lacking a firm requirement to do so.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":644,"featured_media":14027,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[15,25,14,116,636],"class_list":["post-14026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guidance","tag-as9100","tag-guidance-document","tag-iso-9001","tag-iso-90012015","tag-strategic-direction","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14026"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14030,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14026\/revisions\/14030"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}