I feel compelled to provide a short rant on quality, following a discussion on the matter last night, as I honestly feel most people or organisations as the case may be, completely miss the point with quality.

Quality for me has two essential elements:
1. Checking that you are doing what you are suppose to do; and
2. Checking that what you are supposed to do is doing what it is supposed to do.

This statement has been described in plain simple language to avoid all the bamboozling that quality people tend to attach to it.

The problem with most quality auditors, is that although they have extensive training in number one, they are normally not process experts. furthermore, most audit processes are designed to check purely on item one.

Let me give you an example, related to flight training. A quality auditor checking on how you complete transition training, will ask you to show the section in your operations manual that describes transition training. This will normally refer to a transition training manual, so they will ask to see this (and tick a box - yes, documentation referred to is there). The transition training manual will refer to a training record, which they will ask for (and tick another box), then they will ask to see a recent transition training student file, which should contain a completed training record with all the required items filled in (there’s another box to tick).

If the process described in the operations manual has been followed, and all the documentation is complete, including a process to follow if there is failures, the auditor is happy. Auditors will normally confirm that the process confirms to the minimum legal requirements, but as far as most quality systems go, that’s the end of it.

How do we know the transition training syllabus itself was a quality product? Well of course that is not the job of a quality auditor, most people will reply, this is the responsibility of the company experts, in this case the chief pilot/chief flight instructor and the training manager.

Therein lies the old adage, which I first learnt when I was exposed to ISO9000 back in the early 90’s, a quality system can ensure your process is completed accurately, but if your process is s**t, your quality system will ensure that you stick to all the procedures for producing s**t! A great thing wasn’t it?

So how does a quality expert who is not a subject expert ensure quality? Of course there are ways, which any of the better quality courses and auditors will now recognise, such as proper customer feedback surveys, monitoring of process success/failure rates, identifying faulty processes, discussion with process implementers at all levels (in this case the instructors) to name a few.

A quality auditor who is a topic expert can normally provide a better insight than one who is not, but provided the second part, and in my opinion the most important part of quality, is not forgotten the goal will be achieved, and the quality audit will add to the quality of the process.

Any quality auditors out there, please send comments!?