ISO 9001:2015: Understand, Implement, Succeed!

4. Making a Compelling Case for Leadership and Governance

An organized and well-structured approach to quality is a necessity; quality departments perform important work by carrying out numerous risk mitigation activities within their traditional responsibilities of compliance, cost containment, and improvement. However, in the traditional, compliance-based model, the QMS doesn’t encroach upon top managers’ daily lives—and in many respects, quality activities are designed to ensure that things remain that way. In the compliance-based model, top managers are aware of many quality concerns but have delegated everything (except their disappointment when things go wrong) to the quality department, which is expected to initiate investigations and ...