This marks the first of a series of “How to Be an Excellent ISO 9001 Consultant” articles; it would equally apply to consultants of other management systems including AS9100, ISO 14001, TS 16949, etc.
Here I present some common mistakes that ISO 9001 consultants make which both hinder their own success, as well as the success of their clients. In no particular order:
1.) Expect to get rich. ISO 9001 is not, by any measure, a rich man’s game. Dwindling interest, increased resistance, and poor oversight by its authorities have cut deeply into the market. Would-be consultants have an unfounded fantasy that if they hang their shingle, clients will come running. That’s not true, and market forces have driven pricing down so that when a client does appear, they will not be handing you an open checkbook. Padding contracts with long term conditions, unending expenses, and “up-selling” additional services are the mark of a truly bad consultant who has little understanding of his or her client’s true needs. Fixed price contracts are the best approach. A good consultant works fast, provides accurate and excellence service, and focuses on earning a living by acquiring multiple clients, not by trying to earn an entire year’s salary on one or two. Even then, you will not pull bank like a Hollywood plastic surgeon. You must enter this business because you want to help companies, people and industry, not because you want to buy a new boat to put inside your other boat.
2.) Doomsaying. Consultants have an unusual tendency to present current-state reality as a Zombie Apocalypse. They also always seem shocked that a client who has just hired them doesn’t have anything already in place (hint: that’s why they hired a consultant.) A typically over-gloomy remark might sound like. “You haven’t done anything! This is going to take so much work. You really are far off from where you need to be!”
This doesn’t do anyone any good, even when it’s 100% true. Consultants need to learn some bedside manner, and present bad news with tact, calm and even a bit of spin. Consider instead: “We’ve got some challenges, but nothing I haven’t seen before. We can work this out, we’ll just have to stay focused.” See how I incorporated myself into the discussion by saying “we”? It’s a team effort, and the client wants to know they hired you to help them, not merely shout the panicked orders of a captain on a sinking ship.
Clients want to see calm, experienced confidence. Panicking them only makes you look like a newbie.
3.) Overemphasize “management commitment.” This common claim has its origins in a well-intentioned ISO 9001 requirement (clause 5.1), but has become the crutch for lazy consultants who want to start their work with an easy escape clause: if things go wrong, they can blame management.
Other than the obvious, this is also bad for two other reasons: first, it sends a message to the client that the consultant lacks the ability to rally the team, including management, and is offloading that responsibility back to the people who hired him. Second, it is often interpreted as a subtle jab at the guys paying you; it implies the company hasn’t had any management commitment to date. Even if that’s true —especially if it’s true — the client doesn’t want to hear it.
Finally, it also happens to be nonsense. Management commitment helps, but in many cultures – especially the US – management has to be won over after the fact. A good consultant can lead the ISO 9001 effort even in a environment hostile to ISO 9001, and then win them over later by showing them the results of the program. (Right now a lot of not-so-good consultants are shaking their heads on that point. Managers, meanwhile, are nodding in agreement.) By showing management end results such as reduced scrap, increased productivity, profits, you will get far more “management commitment” than any speech at an opening meeting. These are the things that win over managers, and often times you have to do the work first and get the “commitment” later.
Is that ideal, or even easy? No, but it’s what you are being paid for.
4.) Reliance on friendly auditors. Here I am not talking about outright collusion, where a consultant and auditor have a side deal that provides financial benefit to them both, outside of the view of the client. Instead, some consultants find an auditor they like, and promote that auditor from client to client. Perhaps the auditor is friendly, perhaps he or she “goes easy” on the consultant’s clients, perhaps it’s an old friend, or previous trainer. None of this serves the client well, and it weakens the consultant’s abilities over time. When a different auditor enters the mix, all hell breaks loose.
A good consultant should be able to handle any auditor a registrar throws at them, being skilled enough to implement systems that meet the majority of auditors’ expectations, and being willing to (gently!) challenge a bad auditor, when they encounter one. (More on that point later.)
5.) Data dump. Few consultants actually have any training on how to be a consultant. As a result, they do now know the best methods for knowledge transfer. They perform a “raw data dump” and regurgitate all their knowledge onto the client, in no particular sequence or, worse yet, following the numbering of the ISO 9001 standard. The client is left struggling to interpret the mess long after the consultant has left. This is why ISO 9001 implementation training courses are so notoriously bad … they rely on this method of knowledge transfer, rather than tailoring it to the particular client.
All information must be transferred in an ordered fashion, optimized to help the client understand why certain things are required, letting them pause to work with it for a while before moving onto the next subject. Despite appearances, this will result in a faster implementation program, because the information is pushed more quickly and absorbed more readily. Less re-training is required later.
To do this, the consultant must develop a true implementation “program” – a blueprint for how the consulting activities will normally progress, through milestones and other activities. This can be a template, but then must be modified for the particular client. It should be updated as the contract progresses, and changed accordingly.
6.) Training the client to be a consultant. Consultants often don’t realize that by teaching clients everything they know (see #5 “Data Dump”), they are not training clients on ISO 9001, but instead training them to become their competition.
Typical scenario: a procedure is required, so the consultant trains the client on how to write a procedure. Perhaps a week later, the consultant returns to review the client’s procedure, only to point out the weaknesses, order some edits, and come back later to check again. It’s agonizingly slow, and would be better served if the consultant just wrote the procedure based on information gleaned from interviews.
This approach teaches the client how to create an ISO 9001 QMS, rather than use one, which is only good if the client wants to become an ISO 9001 consultant. It sounds like a subtle distinction, but there is actually a vast difference. Clients are not tech writers, they are not skilled at writing procedures that address all the requirements, and they don’t need to be. Once again, that’s what they have hired you for.
You are paid to develop and deliver the QMS. The client wants to get busy with using the system, not crafting it. Their input is essential, of course, but the nuts and bolts of building the system are the work of the consultant. Then the client can focus on implementing those procedures and moving forward to improve them.
Consider this: your doctor doesn’t teach you how to do surgery on yourself, but he will help you improve once the surgery is complete.
7.) Reliance on boilerplates and previous client documents. Boilerplate documents provide a limited use, mostly for saving time when writing procedures that are unlikely to differ between clients, such as management review (because the standard is so descriptive in what is required, leaving little room for creativity.) But the bulk of procedures are likely to be very, very different from one client to the next, and the use of boilerplates will either require the consultant to fit the company around the procedure (never good), or to re-write the procedure from scratch anyway.
Consultants will also often use documents they’ve written for other clients, and the risk here is that (again) the previous client’s approach doesn’t work for the new client, or (most embarrassingly) the previous client’s name will pop up in the document’s text or metadata, revealing the game. Instead it’s best to only use boilerplate text as a last resort, to obtain data from the client through interviews, and then write procedures based on that, only adding or changing things when a specific requirement is not met.
8.) Staying within the box. ISO 9001 has devolved into a set of memes, cultivated by lazy registrar auditors and somnambulist consultants. These include such non-requirements as the “training matrix,” “master document list,” “job descriptions,” “process maps” and “document numbers.” None of these are specific requirements, but you’d be hard pressed to find an auditor or consultant who didn’t think at least one of those really was mandated by ISO 9001. As a result, consultants tend to impose these methods on clients, rather than find an alternative “out of the box” approach that might better suit the client.
Consultants must tailor their solutions to the client, and sometimes that means “going nuts” with new ideas. For example, I once wrote a quality manual that utilized single-panel cartoons to present most of the information. Don’t worry about getting registrar buy-in; that can be dealt with later, by communicating clearly with the registrar. During the implementation, focus on what works for the client, and constantly bounce it against the actual language of the standard, not your memory of it. If it meets the intent, the auditor will have to agree to it later.
9.) Representing the registrar over the client. Too many consultants conduct their own work with both eyes on what they think the registrar will accept. This has the effect of the consultant working more for the registrar than for their own client. As I’ve said, registrars must — by accreditation rules — attempt to understand how each client has interpreted and implemented the various requirements. The client will have plenty of opportunity to explain the approach or method to the auditor. An auditor who refuses to accept a given approach without citing specific evidence on how it fails to comply can be challenged. The client must come first.
10.) Needlessly combating the registrar. The industry may suffer from poorly trained auditors, deceptive CB sales reps, unmotivated Accreditation Bodies and inept ISO management, it’s still no excuse to go off half-cocked on an auditor. Auditors will make mistakes — lots of them, if history is any indicator — and these must be addressed in a calm, procedural manner. Accreditation rules require registrars to process appeals and complaints according to set requirements, and consultants should learn these (ISO 17021) and know how to run such concerns through the documented systems. You’ll have a harder time convincing an auditor, or the appeals committee, of the validity of your challenge if you don’t ground it in evidence and facts, and instead rely on full-on freakouts to make your case.
