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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
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 self-control 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
System
Environment
Environment
System
General systems thinking (GST) Complex adaptive systems thinking (CAS)
You & I
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
emailemailemail
email email
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
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
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
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
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
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
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