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The 10 Pillars of Cognitive Management
By Prasanth Ramakrishnan
IAS Accreditation Officer
Whether you are a quality manager or testing laboratory manager seeking accreditation, your business model requires consistent behavioral and management techniques. In fact, IAS accreditation requires that management teams ensure commitment and integrity per ISO/IEC Standard 17025, General Requirements for the Competence of Testing and Calibration Laboratories.
But how can an organization ensure and monitor its commitment and integrity?
The answer for many is cognitive management, or the process of organizing business behavior and communication techniques into a productive, efficient system. Once in place, these techniques offer a solid foundation for operational effectiveness. Deriving the greatest value from a cognitive management system and measuring an organization’s effectiveness requires careful emphasis on 10 key elements, or what I call the 10 Pillars of Cognitive Management.
1. Internal Audits
Perform internal audits on a periodic basis. While the frequency of internal audits is dependent on an organization’s individual operations, every organization should complete at least one audit annually as a rule of thumb. Internal audits provide sampling exercises. Using a laboratory as an example, the internal auditor may sample some tests, project files and records, make some judgments regarding compliance with the laboratory’s policies and procedures, and report the findings.
It is the responsibility of management to ensure the internal audit is performed stringently to ensure compliance with the required policies and procedures that govern the operations of the organization. This is a Quality Improvement Exercise.
The role of management is to have a qualified auditor independent of the functions involved do the internal audit and ensure there are no conflicts of interest internally or externally. It's up to management to monitor the follow-up actions that occur from an audit.
2. Management Reviews
The role of management is to review the quality and technical aspects that have an impact on the quality goals and objectives. The evaluations may generate corrective and preventive actions. Assign corrective actions to appropriate personnel with specific deadlines for improvement. Once those actions have been corrected, the designated management staff responsible for quality assurance must review and follow-up on the actions to verify that objectives have been met.
3. Customer Satisfaction
Seek out customer feedback and take steps to fill the voids, if any. Analyze areas of concern and streamline recommendations for improvement in line with the strategic goals and objectives of the organization. These activities will help an organization retain its client base and improve communications with its customers.
4. Handling Complaints and Appeals
Review all complaints and appeals in depth. Determine the root causes for complaints and appeals and initiate preventive measures to avoid similar scenarios in the future. Repeated complaints or appeals do not add value and raise questions regarding the effectiveness of quality management.
5. Personnel Competence and Training
Standards and criteria continually change. Scopes of work are not always the same. Discuss training requirements to adapt to industry dynamics. Facilitate staff retraining in cases where there has been significant change in a standard and/or criteria.
6. Staff Awareness on Quality Policy and Procedures
Provide training and seminars on quality policies, operating criteria and other quality procedures to all staff. It is the duty of management to ensure that employees are aware of the operating criteria, quality policy and procedures.
7. Confidentiality and Avoiding Conflicts of Interest
All staff should sign confidentiality agreements so that there are no conflicts of interest on any given project.
8. Gap Analysis
Periodically initiate a gap analysis to identify the voids between the requirements and current operating practices. When voids are identified, take steps to ensure that those areas of disparity are corrected.
9. Employee Motivation and Retention
Employee retention is assured through, and directly linked to, continual encouragement. Recognize and respect employee efforts and provide incentives to employees when they do an exceptional job.
10. Timeliness, Cost and Service Quality
Management must ensure that projects are completed on time (Inventory/Pending Work/Tardiness). Cost management is also a key function of management and cost for the work provided must be optimized. Service quality has a direct correlation with customer satisfaction. As long as the cost, timeliness and requirements are met, customers are satisfied.
Executing and maintaining the 10 pillars of cognitive management outlined above will ensure management’s commitment and integrity towards meeting its quality policy and objectives.