In message <pVmSyHAh6G$0Ew1V@lfheller.demon.co.uk>, Leon Heller writes:

> Interestingly, ISO9000 just says that you have to have procedures, and
> work to them. The procedures could be wrong, and you could be producing
> crap, but you could still get ISO9000 certification.

That's right, and as a result it's easy to laugh it off as a load of
nonsense, which we do fairly regularly.  However, there's another way
of looking at it, probably not the way it was intended but nevertheless
a useful way:  ISO procedures are only as good as the people that
produce them, and therefore a company that values the opinion of its
most competent engineers should allow them to redefine those procedures
as and when they see fit, on a case-by-case basis, so that reality
drives the paperwork rather than the other way around.  It's possible
to treat this as an opportunity, a way of treating procedures as a
dynamic way of passing skills downwards rather than as a joke.

I've yet to see a company with that much vision, but I predict that in
the next few years this will change, as the Rise of the Teccies makes
itself felt.  For the time being, irrelevant procedures merely get
ignored, rather like inappropriate speed limits on motorways, and on
the whole sanity prevails.

Rich.
--
Existing media are so disconnected from reality that our policy debates
spin around a fantasy world in which the future looks far too much like
the past.  http://nano.xerox.com/nanotech/MITtecRvwSmlWrld/article.html