>Finally, I'll conclude my comments by stating that I think ISO 9000 may
>work better in a manufacturing environment, but I don't know because I've
>never worked in such an environment. I do know, however, that it doesn't
>work that well for an environment that lives and breathes off of new
>knowledge. Nor does it provide a framework that allows an organization to
>make rapid, sudden, and/or comprehensive changes. And the only constant I
>can count in my my work is change. . .
I'm working in a manufacturing environment for a reasonable period of
time. It really works well. But a manufacturing organisation does not only
consist of "mechanistic"-oriented organisational units at all. Therefore
you must find a way to encourage discontinuous change in organisational
units like research and product or software development although they are
NOT the core business processes as such. The first approach in our company
was implementing a company-wide proposal system based on proposals made by
individuals or very small groups.
During the last year a new approach was used. Twelve groups with people
coming from all different parts of the company (upper, middle management,
..., worker) were formed. Their job was (and still is) to find solutions
for the most important problem areas of the whole company. The problem
areas were identified by external consultants based on a company-wide
assessment using a structured questionnaire.
After this first year one gets a little taste how this change program
might change the whole organisational life. In parallel ISO is still going
on for the manufacturing departments.
Angelika Mittelmann
artm@ping.at
======================
Angelika, Rudolf & Thomas Mittelmann
in der Ruine
Im Tal 9
A-4040 Linz/Austria
http://www.cast.uni-linz.ac.at/st/staff/rm/rmprivate.html
http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/1517/amprivate.html
http://members.ping.at/artm/
======================
--artm@ping.at (a.r.t. Mittelmann)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>