Self-Assessment Through Annex A
An excellent but infrequently used tool, ISO 9004:2000, "Quality management systems--Guidelines for performance improvement," hasn't received a rousing reception by the user community. Typically, organizations achieve compliance with ISO 9001 and then look to other models to pursue organi-zational excellence.
When ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 9004:2000 were being developed, there was considerable emphasis on ensuring that they became a "consistent pair" of standards so they could be easily used together. That objective was achieved. The two standards' structure and format make it easy for an organization to design and implement a quality management system (QMS) to meet the requirements of ISO 9001, and then refer to ISO 9004--either during or after that implementation--to discover ways the system can be used to improve performance. With knowledge derived from ISO 9004, the QMS can be expanded both in breadth and depth to achieve improved results.
One reason for ISO 9004:2000's neglect seems to be that the standard doesn't directly provide users with instructions for its own use. Users are apparently left to study the entire document and pull out good ideas that might prove useful.
However, ISO 9004:2000, "Annex A-- Guidelines for self-assessment," offers a tool that enables users to get more focused value from ISO 9004.
The self-assessment concept has been around for a long time. Perhaps the best self-assessment tools are provided in the framework of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria and the European Foundation for Quality Management. These tools are great but can be complicated and overwhelming to organizations with little experience in self-assessment. Their greatest value is in helping an organization understand interrelationships within the management system. For organizations with a well-established QMS, the Baldrige model might be appropriate.
With Annex A, ISO 9004 provides a self-assessment tool that's simpler, easier to implement and more focused. It's one of the most effective processes an organization can use to drive improvement and customer satisfaction. It can also characterize both the organization's maturity in specific areas (i.e., benchmarked against best practices) as well as its ability to compete. By using Annex A's self-assessment process, an or-ganization can focus its system improvements on areas with the greatest need.
But even if Annex A is used as described in ISO 9004, there's one significant glitch: The assessment itself should be focused on those areas most important to the business. To do this, the organization must first create an organizational profile, giving the current business model and specifying the external conditions (e.g., market or financial) that the organization expects to face during the next few years. Only then should it list the QMS processes or areas most important to making the business model successful.
ISO 9004:2000's Annex A provides a way for organizations to begin measuring excellence criteria without the overhead inherent in complex assessments. The self-assessment approach it describes could be applied as follows:
1. Create a scale of performance levels appropriate for the organization.
2. Create an organizational profile.
3. Use the profile as an aid to select the most important processes, functions, areas, divisions or organizations to assess.
4. Decide if an individual or a team should perform the assessment.
5. Use ISO 9004:2000 to create a set of criteria for assessing the process, function, area, division or organization.
6. Conduct the assessment using the de-veloped criteria.
7. Decide on improvement priorities and initiate a project to achieve the desired improvement.
The seventh step is the most important. Although the assessment results themselves will be useful, it's important that not every opportunity be awarded equal importance. This is the purpose of scoring. If a rigorous scoring process is used for each item in the criteria, you should get a great deal of information from the score.
Self-assessment requires the organization's leaders to take a critical look at processes and future needs, determine what the organization really is and decide what they want it to be. Leaders must also make the hard decisions to implement the changes that will move the organization to the higher level they want it to reach.
Note: This article is based in part on Unlocking the Power of Your Quality Management System: Keys to Performance Improvement, by John E. (Jack) West and Charles A. Cianfrani (ASQ Quality Press, 2004).
John E. (Jack) West is a consultant, business advisor and author with more than 30 years of experience in a wide variety of industries. He is chair of the U.S. TAG to ISO TC 176 and lead delegate for the United States to the International Organization for Standardization committee responsible for the ISO 9000 series of quality management standards.
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