Most negative tendencies breed in stagnant conditions when everyone wants to maintain status quo. I am afraid a similar situation is developing in the case of Quality Assurance Managers (QAMs) in services sector who survive on Quality Procedures and Internal Audits. One of the first things they do whenever new QAMs take over in a company is to encourage and coerce their colleagues to go in for newer or additional procedures under the guise of covering as many Business Processes involved in the business as possible. The name of ISO (and even WTO) will be brought in at all times to substantiate their suggestion and impress the colleagues about the absolute necessity of having procedures for anything and everything. But little do the executives realise at that stage that the ‘clever climber’ is preparing noose for hanging them at a not-so-distant future.

In a Quality environment, those who do the real work are the owners of any procedure they make for themselves. And any procedure we make for ourselves is very much dependent upon the various external factors prevalent at that particular point of time. This dependency is much more acute in the case of services than in manufacturing sector. While in a manufacturing environment one deals with machines, in the services sector we are dealing with human beings of various characteristics, capabilities and moods. It is very easy to draw up procedures for dead machines than live humans. The impossible task of standardising human beings and their activities is what is being attempted by way of ISO certification in the services sector. The harm that it brings is much larger than the pleasure one gets by way of watching a team of innovative humans being forced to perform as robots in a uniform manner but in an inefficient way.

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