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FAQ: Quality Manual - what is it?Part of what is slightly confusingly called your 'quality documentation'. The manual can be the only thing you have and need, or it may be just a component of your documentation. 'Documentation' means anything written down or captured in some form: written procedures, policies, checklists, forms, or graphics, drawings, flowcharts, diagrams, etc. It can be in any media, hardcopy or soft, including intranet, online, internet or wiki. Your system must be documented if you want to get ISO 9001. The Standard has specific requirements for documentation to include:
Provided you meet these minimum mandatory requirements, you decide what you need and in what format. You can use one or many formats, from checklists and flowcharts to intranets, wikis or workflow embedded into IT systems. Manuals can be hardcopy (paper) or softcopy: online documents like web pages, help files or IT systems. And you can document in various ways, from easy and user-friendly to bureaucratic, verbose and very hard to follow. What does a Quality Manual look like?Contrary to many misinformed beliefs, there's just no single answer to this. It really depends on what you need. Just as a smart car, a delivery truck and a freight train are all vehicles, what is the 'right' quality manual in one organisation may be too much or too little in another. A small business may only need a single manual; a large company usually will need more. The best way of understanding the 'quality manual' is to look at a good example; preferably more than one. Widespread but ignorant and uninformed (mis)belief insists there is One Single Right and Proper format. Utter tosh. It's completely wrong to dictate than an ISO 9001 Quality Manual must always look like X, or that quality manuals must always have these specific headings or must be set out like this. If you've been told that, you've been told wrong. What not to doIf you've seen previous examples of 'Quality Manuals', you'll most probably have seen only bad examples of quality manuals. They proliferated last century. But sadly, those old models are still hanging around: truly awful and of very little value. How to recognise a bad quality manual.
Perhaps you've seen one like that? If not, check some pages from this example quality manual/a> (*pdf format) but take a deep breath first. Too many so-called 'ISO quality systems' (far too many!) strong>still have copious quantities of Documents with a Capital D. Most often few people can read and follow them, much less use them. SSo why do they exist? Because too many people still think that's what a quality manual "should" be. And that a "proper quality manual" has a policy and matching procedures for each and every separate clause in the Standard. That means an absolute minimum/i> of 22 written policies and procedures, maybe more, no matter your type of company or your size! Which creates an awful lot of paperwork with little if any value, parrticularly when it refers to things you've never heard of, let alone understand. Please don't fall into that trap! You'll just end up with a huge pile of wordy documents, but you really don't need them. Unless of course you regularly use procedures with titles like "Design Control", "Management Review" or "Nonconformance"? And like procedures to be wordy, many, many pages long, and full of the same old headings, beginning with a 'Scope' and 'Definitions' and 'Terminology'. Which you have to wade through to try and discover what you're actually meant to do and how. And of course they must be hard to read. Clarity, simplicity and brevity dumped by the wayside as a complete no-no? What's that? You don't/i> want something like that? OOf course you don't. An 'ISO 9001 quality manual' that no one reads or uses is a very common mistake. To see how to avoid that one and others, get my free report. Good quality manuals are very different. And research shows/a> that information that is well designed and clearly presented has measurable benefits, eg, one well designed intranet doubled employee productivity.& What to do
>> See a sample Intelligent Quality procedure from Mapwright. I have been writing clear, simple and straightforward documents for many years. Clients and customers know my approach to writing quality manuals works. See an example here.
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Sample quality manual - awful!
See the difference that clear & simple IQ approach makes: sample quality procedure.
Two full quality
manuals included!
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