The “see something, say something” mantra is being used as a countermeasure for terrorism and crime, but it can also be effective to improve functional safety in development teams and plant sites.  It could be useful in general process improvement as well.

This can be especially evident during training sessions and reviews when someone says: “our process says to do it this way, but this is what we really do …”  So you have to wonder why the process says to do things in a manner that no one applies, or to which no one gives credence.  It is at this point you should ask “why should I do things that way, according to the process, if nobody else does?”  The popular ISO 9000 phrase “Say what you do and do what you say” should not be just lip service to pass an audit.  It should really pervade all parts of the product development lifecycle.  It should not be too hard to change your process.  That will almost insure that discrepancies will creep in. 

First, do you even have a formal written process that can be repeated?  Many processes start out as informal steps.  The ‘old-timers’ knew what they were doing and trained everybody else.  Most good practices were passed down by word-of-mouth; everybody was too busy doing things to write them down.  I’m not saying the old-timers were any better or more disciplined, but you can’t deny culture shifts from the Baby-Boomers thru Gen-X, Gen-Y, and Millennials.  There are so many options to choose that you want to evaluate them and choose the best ones.  Don’t be afraid to question how things are done.  When the “say what?” moment arrives, you either get a good reason or you suggest a better way.

We need to do what makes sense.  The formal process does not need to spell out every detail for every project (that task falls on the development plan… and that’s another subject).  The overall process needs to be a framework that can support good practices and tailoring, yet still allow discovery of better methods.  And it should allow different groups to do different things when that makes it easy to do their job.  That does not mean you remove all consistency from the task set. It means you apply consistency in ways that make sense.  Life is too short to fill up your online server with processes that no one is using.