3 ms·

My first job out of college was at an ISO9000 certified place. It was weird. If I wanted any documentation, I had to go to a specific desk and fill out a form

My first job out of college was at an ISO9000 certified place. It was weird. If I wanted any documentation, I had to go to a specific desk and fill out a form, checking all the documents I wanted. She had to go make copies, mark me as having them "checked out", then, after a few days, I finally got the documents that I requested. Of course, often they turned out not to be the documents I actually needed, so the process started over again. I'm sure ISO9000 is an improvement over the worst-case, but dang if it doesn't introduce an amazing amount of bureaucracy into just getting things done. Not to mention adding bureaucracy to documenting things once you've done them. In my experience, the best thing for institutional memory and process documentation in general is an internal wiki. Syntax can me learned in minutes, the barrier to documenting is extremely low, reorganizations are easy, and old versions are archived.

vidarh 15y ago
ISO9000 doesn't require what you describe, though. It requires that you have documented processes for quality management of processes, for recording exceptions, and for communicating exceptions to involved parties (including customers). The process you describes sounds to me like a measure put in place because there is a requirement that documentation be kept up to date. I did a contract once to streamline updates to the ISO 9001 quality handbook for a large company, and part of the hassle was that while they mostly relied on an electronic copy on their intranet, they also needed printed versions and they needed to be kept in sync. They wanted to minimize the use of the printed version exactly because they had to keep track of the copies and ensure every one of them were updated (or destroyed) when there were changes, so that everyone were working from the current versions. When I was there, they had ca. 300 ring binders of printed versions, and every time a page was added, removed or changed, someone had to track down all of those 300 ring binders to update them... All of this hassle was down to the paper versions - the intranet version was a simple set of documents with some basic hyperlinking, and the update criteria were satisfied by simply prohibiting making copies of it. You could likely satisfy ISO 9001 documentation requirements with an internal wiki - none of the bureaucracy it introduces prevents it AFAIK. What it does prevent is taking a lax attitude to updating that wiki.

vidarh 15y ago

ISO9000 doesn't require what you describe, though. It requires that you have documented processes for quality management of processes, for recording exceptions, and for communicating exceptions to involved parties (including customers). The process you describes sounds to me like a measure put in place because there is a requirement that documentation be kept up to date. I did a contract once to streamline updates to the ISO 9001 quality handbook for a large company, and part of the hassle was that while they mostly relied on an electronic copy on their intranet, they also needed printed versions and they needed to be kept in sync. They wanted to minimize the use of the printed version exactly because they had to keep track of the copies and ensure every one of them were updated (or destroyed) when there were changes, so that everyone were working from the current versions. When I was there, they had ca. 300 ring binders of printed versions, and every time a page was added, removed or changed, someone had to track down all of those 300 ring binders to update them... All of this hassle was down to the paper versions - the intranet version was a simple set of documents with some basic hyperlinking, and the update criteria were satisfied by simply prohibiting making copies of it. You could likely satisfy ISO 9001 documentation requirements with an internal wiki - none of the bureaucracy it introduces prevents it AFAIK. What it does prevent is taking a lax attitude to updating that wiki.