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Many quality managers are having a hard time getting support from management. The yearly management review is an opportunity to get the opinion of higher management when it comes to the management system. In that respect, it can be described as a yearly check of the engine.

Management review: the structure

Every company has its own way of handling the management review. There is of course the required input which is stipulated in the standard such as:

  • Status of the action points from last review
  • Major changes that have an influence on the management review
  • Info about the effectiveness of the management system such as:
    • customer satisfaction results
    • the extend to which the goals are reached
    • corrective actions and deviations
    • audit results
  • Company defined KPIs which may include
    • Number of ill employees
    • Number of quality issues
    • Number of safety issues
    • Number of environmental issues
  • The availability of required resources
  • The actions taken to reduce risks
  • The opportunities for improvement

Besides the review of last year a quick peek into the future is mostly part of the exercise. This covers the goals/objectives for the coming year and the major changes that are expected. These are the standards and sometimes even mandatory checks for the management review. However to really get input from different perspectives, more unambiguous question are needed. An example is:

How is the management system supported by the company overall?

This question forces management to think about how the entire company contributes to the management system, not just the quality management team. The input of every individual within the company is crucial to get an effective management system in place: the more people contribute the better. Upper management should really think about how employees perceive the management system and take away the hurdles for people to contribute to it. To achieve this it is for example important to make it easy to file issues and encourage proposal of improvements. Forcing management to think about these topics once a years isn’t that bad at all even though it might contain questions that are difficult to answer.

High Level Structure

With the new standard some new topics could be added to the management review. The management review is a great opportunity to re-evaluate the risk analysis, context analysis and the stakeholder analysis. During the management review management can check if the documents are still up to date. It could very well happen that some major market changes have occurred which introduced new risks.

Recommended is to keep the stakeholder analysis, context analysis and risk analysis active by reviewing the documents regularly. The management review is a great point in time to re-evaluate them once again.

Let us know how you perform your management review in the comments.

Ebook high level structure

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