The Quality Manual Alias the Quality Bible or the Quality DNA
Document what you do and do what you document
Quality Manual is the foundation and framework from where you build your organization. It is a plan, which sets the direction and navigates the organization within the defined parameters. Like any plan, it is good to revisit once in a while and check against the agreed objectives, make changes where appropriate and reset the sails.
Often companies go overboard and create a huge, unmanageable Quality Manual that is basically a re-writing of the ISO standard with a change from “you shall” to “we will.”
What can confuse people is that actually you can choose what your documents look like, what format and structure you use, and what to put in them. And you can write your document in various ways, from easy and user-friendly to bureaucratic, verbose and very hard to follow.
How to get useful ‘written stuff’?
The best way of understanding and figuring out what to do is to study a good example. Even better, more than one.
For hints on what to do, see this short and clear infographic, the 1st part of a Quality Manual trilogy.
