Transcript Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design

Resilience as a goal for quality
management systems design
Petter Øgland, Department of
Informatics, University of Oslo
UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008
Background and motivation
• Complex Adaptive
Systems (CAS)
seems to be an
interesting framework
for thinking about
design of quality
management systems
(QMS) in turbulent
organizations
Observation/question
• CAS has been used efficiently for creating
distributed control systems to be used in artificial
intelligence and robotics (Brooks, 1989, 2002;
Kelly, 1994)
• In organization theory, CAS appears to be
dominantly used for criticising “command and
control” (Stacey et al, 2000) or motivating BPR
(Beckford, 2002), not for prescribing distributed
control designs (QMS design)
• How to use CAS for designing a QMS in a
politically turbulent organization?
Hypothesis
• Rather than trying to explicitly design a
QMS, perhaps it would be better to “grow”
a QMS by “seeding” frameworks for selfcontrol among various teams in the
organization and then nurture and cultivate
the frameworks
Arguing CAS as not unreasonable
strategy for QMS design
• Some researchers argue that CAS and the
mathematics of chaos and complexity breaks
with earlier concepts of command and control
(Stacey et al, 2000; Beckford, 2002; Dooley,
1995)
• Simon (1996, chapter 7) argues against this in
saying that CAS is a ”conservative extension” of
earlier modes systems thinking
• As ISO 9000 was originally developed for
conventional systems thinking (Hoyle, 2006),
Simon leads us to believe that CAS might be an
equally suitable systems approach as any
Design for empirical research
(action research)
• An “artificial intelligence” approach
towards a CAS based QMS design was
developed in one organization 1992-1999
(quality control of meteorological data)
• A QMS is designed in another organization
(NTAX), applying the same CAS approach
now on a socio-technical system rather
than just a technical system
CAS design principle for QMS
You & I
System
Environment
General systems thinking (GST)
Environment
System
Complex adaptive systems thinking (CAS)
DNMI QMS topology
Airport weather
data
System
monitoring
Weekly and monthly
climate statistics
email
email
SONDE
(weather balloon
data)
email
Quality
Manager /
Computer
Programmer
email
email
AANDERAA
SYNOP
email
AWS
email
email
HIRLAM
(weather forecast
data)
NTAX QMS topology
Documentation
control
COBOL software
control
Development life
cycle quality
assurance
audit
audit
Controlling the
revision of
standards and
methods
audit
Quality
Manager /
Action
Researcher
audit
audit
Control of ITIL
implementations
CobiT audits
audit
EFQM
assessments
audit
audit
ISO 9001/9004
assessments
A personal assessment of the
organization (system)
• Management: A QMS is needed to satisfy
external stakeholders, to manage and to
improve, BUT it is often strategically better
to hide faults than admit and improve
• Workers: All others should follow
standards, but personally I would like be
flexibility and improvise
• => People in quality management may
easily end up as scapegoats
NTAX QMS performance
Rapid improvements
12
10
Sudden
collapse
(political
mistake)
8
6
4
Beginning
2 from scratch
0
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
Quality Reports (process assessments)
2005
2006
Redefined
as action
research
What went wrong?
• Audits and measurements generated tension
and conflict (as expected and as needed)
• In order to test methods before implementing
and improving the quality unit, it seemed
reasonable to apply “own medicine” (secondorder cybernetics)
• Surprise (to me): quality personnel and auditors
at NTAX revolted against being subject to own
methods
Should the revolt have been
anticipated?
• Survey investigation
and interview with 30
ISO 9000 experts at
national quality
conference: Would
you, as an ISO 9000
consultant, apply ISO
9000 on your own
organization?
5
4,5
4
3,5
3
2,5
2
1,5
1
0,5
0
Yes
No
Why did the internal conflict within
the quality department matter?
• The quality department was organized
under the projects department
• The head of the projects department world
view: Deliver projects on time within cost
(quality = “good enough”)
• In 2005 a new quality manager was
appointed, but in 2008 he gave up quality
management to rather devote his time to
projects management (to feel appreciated)
Insights for improved CAS design
• The CAS approach might be very efficient (as
the first years 2000-2004 indicated) doing
assessments of the organization against ISO
9000, EFQM, CMM, ITIL, BSC, CobiT etc
• As the CAS design places the quality manager
(action researcher) in the role of ”environment”
for making the ”system” grow quality awareness,
it is necessary to have full protection
• Protection comes from myopic attention to the
people above (”your boss is your most important
customer”)
Conclusion: Top-down engineering
+ bottom-up evolution
A. Focus on (1) goals of organization
and (2) goals of immediate superior
ISO 9001
Top Management
B. Work as “environment” for the
“system” to develop strategies
system
system
Administration
system
environment
system
Processes & Customers
system
system
system