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Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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Page 1: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design

Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

Page 2: 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

Page 3: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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?

Page 4: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

Hypothesis

• Rather than trying to explicitly design a QMS, perhaps it would be better to “grow” a QMS by “seeding” frameworks for self-control among various teams in the organization and then nurture and cultivate the frameworks

Page 5: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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

Page 6: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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

Page 7: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

CAS design principle for QMS

System

Environment

Environment

System

General systems thinking (GST) Complex adaptive systems thinking (CAS)

You & I

Page 8: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

DNMI QMS topology

QualityManager /ComputerProgrammer

System monitoring

SYNOP

Weekly and monthly climate statistics

AWS

HIRLAM(weather forecast data)SONDE

(weather balloon data)

Airport weather data

AANDERAA

email

email

emailemailemail

email

email email

Page 9: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

NTAX QMS topology

QualityManager /Action Researcher

COBOL software control

CobiT audits

Development life cycle quality assurance

EFQM assessments

ISO 9001/9004 assessments

Controlling the revision of standards and methods

Documentation control

Control of ITIL implementations

audit

audit

auditauditaudit

audit

audit audit

Page 10: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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

Page 11: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

NTAX QMS performance

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Quality Reports (process assessments)

Rapid improvements

Suddencollapse(politicalmistake)

Redefinedas actionresearch

Beginningfrom scratch

Page 12: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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” (second-order cybernetics)

• Surprise (to me): quality personnel and auditors at NTAX revolted against being subject to own methods

Page 13: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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?

0

0,5

1

1,5

2

2,5

3

3,5

4

4,5

5

Yes No

Page 14: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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)

Page 15: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

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”)

Page 16: Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep 1.-3. 2008

Conclusion: Top-down engineering + bottom-up evolution

Top Management

Administration

Processes & Customers

system

system

system system

system

system

system

environment

ISO 9001

A. Focus on (1) goals of organizationand (2) goals of immediate superior

B. Work as “environment” for the “system” to develop strategies