Published articles

QNewZ articles

The New Zealand Organisation for Quality (NZOQ) is NZ’s professional body for Quality Assurance professionals; their website is HERE .

Here are some of Ian’s articles from NZOQ’s professional journal

Feel free but please don’t overlook the copyright

Copyright exists in these articles.  Please feel free to read them, but if you use them for reference, please be kind enough to recognise me and the QNewZ source in full.

Article List:

ROOT CAUSES or reasons or just getting there?
Investigations, risk & safety

Prof James Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model of organisational accidents and the importance in effective safety systems of a Just Culture that ensures issues are reported.

2008-05 QNewz Reason & just culture.pdf

2008-07 QNewz Commensurate with risks.pdf

2008-09 QNewz No smoke.pdf

2008-11 QNewz Smart talk.pdf

2009-03 QNewz Get it right.pdf

2009-05 QNewz Right from risk.pdf

Leading and lagging indicators of performance

If you’re not measuring it, you’re not managing it!  Last month’s financials are never enough, stopping kidding yourself!  So, just what are Critical Success Factors, what’s a KPI and what’s a KRA?  What’s the difference, and why do you need both?  

2009-07 Newz Lead & Lag Indicators.pdf

2012-11 Getting real with KPIs

2013-03 Critical Success Factors (CSF) – a picture is worth a thousand words

2013-05 Making sense of performance reporting and internal audits (more on CSFs from 2013-03)

Horses for courses

Presentation for the NZOQ Annual Congress 2008 that tracks the history of the mainstream QA methodologies and sets them against whose interests they were aimed to serve first.

Horses for courses, how to pick your winning QA system

Tools to use to make things better 

Using the right tools always makes the job easier..

2010-03 Use a dime to save a fortune.pdf

​​2010-05 LULU competency based training.pdf

2010-07 When is a system not a system.pdf

2010-09 Start the engine.pdf

2010-12 Digging out the root cause.pdf

2011-03 Hot models, sausages and international auditing.pdf

2011-07 Developing an affinity for problem solving – Affinity Diagram.pdf

2011-09 Working on the relationships – Interrelationship Diagraph.pdf

2012-03 Red bead funnel.pdf

2012-07 Risk management and the R-Map.pdf

Assigning responsibilities, delegating authorities (RACI chart & deployment flowchart)

2012-07Just whose job is it anyway? Pt 1.pdf

2012-09 Just whose job is it anyway? Pt 2.pdf

Solutions first syndrome; or the easy way to avoid continual improvement

Paper on “Solutions first syndrome” delivered at the World Congress on Business Excellence  in Auckland, NZ, December 2012.  Talks about causal factor analysis as necessary to determine the problem BEFORE designing the solution…not rocket science but we all suffer from it!  Conventional root cause analysis tools miss the point!

2012-12 Solutions First paper – World Congress.pdf

LinkedIn

Where did ISO 9001 come from?

Who created it and why?  And where did certification come from?

The story so far; ISO 9001 since the 1980s

 

Picking your winner when it comes to continual improvement systems (LinkedIn version of the article above).

Horses for courses

 

Ever wondered what the process approach was, or how to audit it?

Process auditing for ISO 9001, somewhere to start perhaps?