After spending the better part of the last 20 years in and out of organisations auditing their management systems – be that safety, quality or something more integrated – it is pleasing for QRMC’s auditors to see the tide turning (albeit slowly in some quarters) in relation to the look and feel of management systems.
Going back to the early 2000s there was a sort of documentation ‘arms race’ whereby organisations were almost completing to have the biggest and most complex management system. More and more processes were added to address issues as they emerged and as regulatory requirements evolved. In this period of unrestrained growth, organisations had (and some still do) a myriad of Policies, Standards, Procedures, Work Instructions and Guidelines with overlapping information.
Then the larger more diverse national operations also had Division/Business Unit specific documentation developed and operating in parallel with each other. A Corporate-level Policy or Standard outlined the required content for Business Unit (BU) documents, and subsequently each BU developed specific procedures, incorporating the corporate information and modifying it as necessary to address their own operational requirements.
This approach led to an increase in both the number and length of documents, further complicated by mandatory templates requiring extensive sections—such as Purpose, Scope, Rationale, Definitions, and Responsibilities—before addressing procedural details.
As these systems grew larger and larger without delivering the intended results, the industry reached a turning point, recognising that existing processes were ineffective and only encouraged minimal compliance from busy end-users.
Many organisations have successfully streamlined by consolidating business-unit documents for consistent processes, but further progress is needed. Management Systems need to be targeted to assist Managers, Supervisors and ‘point of risk workers’ while being conscious of the amount of time these personnel have to read, review and then apply written processes.
The term ‘user-friendly’ needs to be enshrined as a mantra to make compliance with these processes as easy to understand, straight forward and as foolproof as possible. Inspections, audits, document reviews and management reviews need to not only assess that the system content is current and technically correct, but also that it is presented in a manner that is as end-user-friendly as possible and makes compliance straightforward.
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