Mike:

Thank you so much for your article. I could not agree more that eliminating waste is important. Keeping it simple helps everyone understand quality and ensures the manual will be followed better!

Karen

Or to re-train? The auditors, the registrars or the accreditation bodies? Or all of them? I've been an auditor myself for twenty years and I still do internal audits: I'm not proud of myself when going out of a company I have to record nothing but trivial non compliances, to match the standard's requirements. Be them turtles, octopuses or SWOTs, it's always a "significant waste of time", only good for consultants or training organizations that vampire their customers on this. Let's be honest and mirror ourselves: most companies are what they are, they don't want any registration unless forced to, and we all know that there's no worst way to make somebody do something than forcing him.  

I found your article to be a bit over the top by completely discarding the use of the turtle diagram. I have successfully implemented turtle diagrams and found them to very useful.

I didn't need an auditor to "teach" me how to "add" to my QMS documentation. I replaced the antiquated use of procedures (the ones that never left the file drawer anyway) with a useful tool for communication and understanding. I reduced my quality manual to just a few pages and eliminated every useless procedure (kept the ones required by the standard).

The turtle diagram does not replace a good mapping of the process but it can replace about 75% of most quality systems that were standard and procedure based instead of being process based as the new standard fully intended.

The ISO standard was revised from the old "shall have a documented procedure" days. The old procedure based ISO standard created a cottage industry in writing procedures. The new ISO standard has now evolved into to a process based system that forbids the use of standard based checklists during 3rd party auditing.

Don't be so quick to throw out a useful tool in the guise of reducing documentation when your only answer is to create even more useless procedures.

I’ll take a good process flow chart and a turtle diagram any day over a standard and procedure based quality system. The only real mistake the authors of the new process based ISO standard made was the weak wording that allowed procedure based quality systems to continue with only a matrix to show how their old dusty procedures were “really” processes. The only other possible real error was to still call the new ISO standard a quality management system instead what it should be called… a business management system.

Thank you for the article.   I found the article while responding to a request to "dust off my turtles, its audit time."  I find it inappropriate to hand any document to an auditor that isnt integral to our business.  Turtles have a place, lets keep them in the pond.