A Framework for Collaboration and Quality: SMMA’s ISO 9001 Journey | Ryan Farias & Jessica Smith

Hi, I'm Jessica. I'll give you a little bit more background about me in addition to what Chris just said. I'm an engineer by degree, I'm an architect by license, and I'm a project manager by practice. So I can talk to all kinds. But here, I'm here today as quality manager from SMMA, here to give you some insight into our quality system.

I'm Ryan, and I'm none of those things. I'm just the director of marketing and principal at the firm. But thanks for having us back. We're here to talk to you about our quality management systems and our ISO 9001 certification. And if you were to ask me 6 or 7 months ago, I would have told you that was the most boring sentence I've ever said in my life. But I'm a believer now. Jess has converted me. I've seen the light.

One at a time.

Yes. We've done a lot of history and a lot of interviewing to really find out more about this change that happened in our firm about 25, 30 years ago. So a little bit about SMMA real quickly. We're a multidisciplinary practice— architecture, landscape architecture, MEP, FP, structural, civil, interior design, and graphic design. I think I have them all. We're based in Cambridge. We also have an office in Providence. Most of our client base is New England, but they take us now We've been around since 1955, and over that period we've transitioned leadership about 4 times. 4 times.

Mm-hmm.

And for a relatively small firm, about 170 and growing, we've got a pretty diverse client base. We focus on life sciences, advanced technology. We have corporate and commercial and workplace, federal government work, K through 12, and a little bit of higher education as well. So I noticed that earlier we had a lot of people that were familiar with ISO, so we thought we'd just jump right into it. This is our QMS interrelational chart. Spend about 10 or 15 minutes on this. We'll start right up in the upper left, go up and down, move around a little bit. It's no problem, right? Jim, you ready? I wouldn't do that to you. She might, but I won't.

I won't.

But this is really a chart when I started digging in. that Jess showed me from our original ISO certification. I still don't know. I have no idea. But it exists, and it means something.

So— It does.

We'll get back to it. Just real quick, what firms are ISO 9001— what firms have their QMS ISO 9001 certified? Nice. Okay, we're gonna be hosting a table after this. Love to connect with some of you, maybe start a community. That's how it works, right? Boom, here we go. A little bit about ISO 9000 and 9001. It stands for the International Organization of Standardization. It began in 1947. You might be doing what I did originally, I-O-S, ISO. It actually, the ISO derives from the Greek word isos, which means equal. It's an international organization, so they wanted to make sure the acronym worked across all languages. They, today they have over 22,000 standards published, and the 9000 family, which is one of those, is one of their most popular. It's based on quality management, quality assurance, and we are here to talk more about the 9001 standard within that family that you can get certified with. So 9001, based on the idea of continual improvement, and its framework helps you develop processes that help you identify and address risks associated with your organization, helps you ensure the delivery of your services to your client's satisfaction. Any business can get ISO 9001. A lot of people think that this is for big manufacturing, Federal government type contractors, but any business. And in fact, what they will tell you is that it's perfect for smaller companies, especially those that don't have the dedicated staff to quality.

So you're probably thinking, what's in it for me? Why should I care? What if I told you that there was a magic wand you could wave that would help you to retain clients? Marketing group would be pretty happy about that, right?

Wave what?

You could reduce errors and omissions, and therefore insurance costs. No downside to that. Adhere to project schedules. We all know that time is money, and delays on one project could have a ripple effect through staffing throughout the firm. Understand pathways to profitability. With defined processes in place, there are efficiencies that are realized that can lead to a better bottom line. And improve communications. In a service industry like ours, communication, or lack thereof, is really the number one risk factor to be considered. So adopting an ISO 9001 quality system can help you to mitigate all of these areas of risk and more. This is what our system looks like today. We've come a long way from that chart that Ryan led off with. Basically, our manual is broken into 3 main sections. We have one for management, operations, and administration. As you can imagine, the management section is based on, you know, higher-level aspects of quality. For example, we have a disaster recovery plan. In some cases, it's called a business continuity plan that outlines how we can maintain our operations in the face of a natural disaster, if there's a fire in our building or something like that. We also have a crisis management plan. This is for non-natural disasters. If, you know, perhaps there's an accident on a job site, we want to make sure that there's a communication plan in place that the entire firm knows about. They know what they can say, what they can't say, and most importantly, who to defer to in these cases. And then most important in the eyes of ISO is trend analysis, which is found in our Measures of Success policy. They want to know that we're measuring and proving continual improvement and not just talking about it and claiming it. So this is an example of a trend analysis report that I issue quarterly to our management team. We have a survey that goes out to our project teams after they've issued CDs, and it's about 15 questions. It asks questions about staffing, resources, team communication, project goals, things like that. And then the results are tabulated, so however many projects in that quarter, they're compiled, which really helps us to identify the trends instead of just looking on a one-off basis as projects are completed. The quarterly view helps things to jump out at you. We've used it to head off issues that are arising with communication when we're adopting new technology. Sometimes the those show up in these results. So it really helps us to stay on top of things. The operation section is probably very similar to what most firms have in place for a quality system. It really focuses on the design process. We've got contract review procedure, scope change, project closeout, and then of course the big one, the design control policy. So You probably all have this. It's an iterative design process. You plan the work. You design. You check. You design. You check through all the different phases of design. But have you ever sat down and thought about all of the steps, the resources that you need, the tools, who's responsible for it every step of the way? It really makes you think when you have to put it to paper like this. And then the admin chapter is based on kind of the behind-the-scenes things that keep things running smoothly. For example, document and data control. This gets into network security, which is really of interest to our government clients. Archive policy. This is for both during projects and after projects. We want to make sure that we're retaining the proper information and no more and for the proper durations. And then training. The continual improvement of individuals really comes in the form of professional development. So we have SMMA Academy as our corporate university, and then Elevate is a program that we started a few years ago to help with the sharing of these— of the training sessions, so that it's not one person that's benefiting from going to a seminar or training session. They come back and they share it and they start a dialogue, and so then it becomes tribal knowledge. So, no matter what your quality manual looks like, at the heart of ISO is the continual improvement loop. Plan, do, check, act is their mantra. You plan the work, you do the work, you check to make sure that you did the work the way that you had planned it, and then you act. That's the big one. You enact improvements. You standardize on best practices. You carry those lessons learned forward to the beginning of the next project. So the improvement action process is one of the highlights of our quality system. It's really the plan, do, check, act in action. I'll walk you through it quickly. In the plan phase, it's very simple. You need 2 things. You need engaged employees that want to make your firm a better place, and you need one person to receive all of the suggestions. That's right. This process is really— it's evolved to be kind of an online suggestion box for people to both bring up potential solutions to issues, but also to highlight best practices. Having one person in charge of it is probably the most important part of this. That way they're accountable, they make sure nothing falls through the gaps, nothing falls on deaf ears, and everything is addressed. So as soon as they receive one of these suggestions, we shift over to the Do phase. There's a lot going on in the Do phase. Kind of the key points to this is you need to determine if it's critical to quality. If this change isn't enacted, are we still gonna be able to achieve our quality objectives? If it's critical, then we have to take it to management for review, not to ask them to solve the problem, just to make them aware of it and let them know that we're working on it. And then an investigation team is assigned and we investigate for root cause. This one is kind of tricky sometimes for architects and engineers. We're trained to solve problems. Once we solve it, we're done. We move on to the next one. Not with ISO. With ISO, you need to dig deeper. You need to find the root cause and fix that so that similar problems don't arise in the future. And then the last box on here is really what we've been spending 2 days talking about, is implementing the action. So it looks Really easy on paper, but we've found, you know, an email is not going to be enough. We try to hit people from many different angles so that they're hearing the same thing from 4 or 5 different sources. We'll announce it with a post on our intranet. We'll introduce it at our operations meeting, which is all of our project managers and our department managers. They then take it forward to their department meetings and project meetings. So, the entire staff is hearing about the same thing from 4 or 5 different sources, and we remind them periodically. And then, after 4 to 6 months, we go to the check phase. This is ISO's way of making sure that everything is working. You have to verify everything you do, verify the effectiveness. So, the reason we wait to do this, we wanna make sure that the change has really taken hold. If we do it too soon, people might still be on their best behavior. It'll still be echoing in their head from the 4 or 5 sources that they've heard it from. In 4 to 6 months, it gives them time to lapse back to their old ways, so we can really gauge if it was effective or not. And so if it was effective, we log it in, close it out. If it was not, we go all the way back to the do phase, and we investigate for root cause again. Great.

Here we go. Storytelling time.

Mm-hmm.

As part of this preparation for this, Jess and I got to interview many employees, some of them retired, past executives, some of them current. We learned a lot because neither of us were here at the firm when they started the quality management system processes and and ISO certification. So, start at the beginning real quick. This is Parker Sims on the left, a mechanical engineer, and Bill Maney, a structural engineer, in the center. MIT alumni. They met there. They later taught there together, started a firm along with John McKee on the right, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute architect with our firm for many, many years. And these 3 gentlemen came together and very intentionally formed a multidisciplinary firm. With the idea that it was going to be a differentiator, that it was going to be attractive to the clients that they were trying to be attractive to. A lot of these were MIT startups like them, very engulfed in research and used to working with lots of different perspectives trying to solve common problems. They led a very successful practice for 33 years. I know we're jumping ahead. It suits my story. Bill Manny as the CEO. Over that time, very successful projects in industrial and lab. I had lots of fun in the archives for this, so bear with me.

We've maybe kept those too long.

Manufacturing and workplace, and later on during the '80s, advanced technology, higher education, even some retail. And around the mid-'80s, they were ready for their first transition, next generation, second generation, very scary time for any firm. How do you do that? How does it work? They had the right generation. They had a group of people that had been working at the firm for about 10 years that knew the culture, knew the clients, and they were led by this gentleman here, Tom Vogel. Tom— yeah, I know, great headshot. Tom was an architect with the firm a little over 10 years, leading the architecture department, and by his peers, Tom was described as a futurist. He had different ideas than the generation before him, not unlike anybody else's second generation to first, or what have you, generation to generation. And for Tom and his partners, they really expressed this idea that we weren't maximizing the potential of the firm's composition, that we needed to work better, we needed to work smarter, we needed to work more efficiently. They actually, in an interview with a former executive, described it like this. And so this was sort of how they worked. There was actually even a physical separation between architecture and interior— I mean, architecture and engineering that they described at our old location. In the first floor, it was all the white, and architects stood there. So, stayed there, and then on the basement floor where there was no light, the engineers stayed there, and they loved that. They appreciated it. When they had to move to the new location, they had to come together. The engineers were petrified. They didn't want to go near the architects. So all we could picture was all these disciplines— wonderful, you're setting up the job perfectly, but then everybody's just staying in their lane. Everybody's siloed. We have a current leader at our firm that's been there for over 30 years. He was a department manager in the late '80s, early '90s, and this is how he described it. And so what we kept hearing was this idea of this process that was happening on our projects that although we were multidisciplinary, we weren't working in integrated. In fact, our projects were looking more like a top-down approach, very traditional approach where leadership makes all the decisions, executive decisions. They plan the work, they develop the scope, they hand the scope off to the disciplines, the disciplines do the work and hand it back. It really creates a very siloed environment. Communication is generally two-way between those disciplines and the leadership, and the work pretty much can be described as reactive. Now, there's nothing wrong with this approach. People use this all the time. When you have strong leadership, it works. It worked for Simpson-Mainey McKee for 30 years, mostly. But second generation wanted to do better. They knew they had to do better. So Tom, at the time, believed that quality management was going to be an ends to a mean. It was going to help him improve the way that we were going to approach our work. He was actually getting a degree in quality management systems when he was introduced to ISO. ISO was first introduced with the 9000 family in the late '80s. It improved a lot into the '90s, but it still was thought of more of a manufacturing process. But Tom brought it to his clients— I mean, to his management board, and he said, listen, I think this is going to create the rigor that we want. It's going to help us create the framework on how we want to operate moving forward. And partners agreed, said, let's try it, let's do it. And essentially what happened is they grabbed about 40 people, sat them down, and said, listen, we want you to use these principles, we want you to use this rigor, this framework, and we want you to really think about the way that you need to operate, the way that you want to operate. And they created our first generation of quality management systems. Now, when I heard this story, I, I thought about it from 2 perspectives. One, imagine being one of the 40 people and your president and CEO comes in and asks you to stop what you're doing and then for the next couple years want to spend time 10, 20 hours a week detailing all the risks inherent in the delivery of your services and thinking about that ecosystem. Develop that process and then figure out how you're going to measure it every year so that you're continually improving. That's a pretty amazing ask. The other perspective I had was from Tom and his partners. Here you are buying this firm, and I don't know if you're like me, but It takes me a month just to buy sneakers, never mind buy a firm, right? The research and everything that goes into it. So these guys know the clients, they know the people, they're making a decision to buy the firm. But I give them a lot of credit for thinking about how we could solidify the way that we want to work. How do we make it so that there's no choice, essentially, that no one can cut corners, that no personality is involved? We're basically going to say, this is the way we're going to work. and we're gonna certify that. Another couple all-star photos here. So they did that. This is actually Tom at a podium. I found these in the archives rolling out our first quality management system at a retreat in Vermont. And the second picture is significant because this is our current CEO and chairman, Ara Karafian, as a young buck in the audience with a spoonful of something. listening on and participating in that. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's stayed around for 30 years and it's been so strong is that the 3 generations of leadership since Tom— since John Parker and Bill all had a hand in creating this. So you develop the quality management system. In 1994, they decide to go for ISO certification. In '96, they receive certification right about the time that Tom's retiring. And Mike Powers, who was also part of that first generation team, is taking over. And I wanted to just share a quick story about Mike because Mike appreciated all the management value that it provided. But for Mike, he was leading a lot of our advanced tech work and he was responding to a lot of pharmaceutical proposals. So for him, ISO 9001 certification of our QMS really was a sales tool. It was a door opener. I mean, he was closing deals with IBM, winning work with Analog Devices and Fairchild and Intel, because here were these massive manufacturing centers, and when they asked the question, well, can you tell us about your quality process? Mike said, here it is, and it's ISO 9001 certified. So it completely took the question off the table because these guys could relate. They understood the rigor. They understood what went into that. But beyond the sales aspect, and that's still, by the way, it's a differentiator today. We still hear a lot of value out of pharma, certainly advanced tech, out of federal government. But beyond that sales aspect, it had a transformational change for our firm. See, now everybody was going to be involved with every aspect of the project, not top-down any longer. It was more of an organic approach, an integrated approach. When you share accountability, The team becomes more agile, it becomes more nimble. People are empowered. And to do that, inspiration's got, I mean, information's gotta be fluid. It has to be transparent. So they had to think about how they were gonna share information, how people could find information within the team. And that meant that the disciplines had to be, were codependent on each other, even influential.

Leadership.

was just as important. But that pivoted now from being the executive decision maker now to being responsible for mentoring, being responsible for creating the space and the time for your teams to connect. Okay? So essentially what they did was they took the top-down pyramid and they flattened it. Everybody on the same level. Just to bring you up to date, We went through our 4th generation leadership. I showed you Ara Karafian earlier. He and his fellow board members took over in 2008. We've kept this going. I gotta get this right. 3-year audits. Every year we do a—

It's recertification on a 3-year basis.

Thank you.

Surveillance audit the other 2.

That's why it's great to have as a point man. And then next week when we get back—

Monday.

Monday, we go through our audit and certification, and hopefully everything goes well, we'll receive our ISO 9001:2015 certification. So I've talked at a very high level because I don't know the details.

He's learning them. It's a work in progress.

But after I learned that, I said, Jess, you know, you really got to show some examples of what that really meant. What were the details, just a couple of the details that really helped us come together and move from that top-down model to the So ISO achieved that transformation through the involvement of people.

It gave everybody an equal voice, and it was more specifically the involvement in the plan phase and the check phase. Everybody had always been involved in the do phase, but now we've got the entire team is in on the work planning at the beginning and the lessons learned at the end. So we'll show you a couple of examples of what it looks like today in our office. So this is a picture of our team. This one's not a stage set.

It's—

this is an actual project team getting together for a work planning session. We have— I'll go around the room, show you who's there. So they used a pull planning session, pull planning technique for this one. Everybody came to the meeting with their list of needs and a pile of sticky notes. And in the meeting, they mapped out all of the interdependencies get them to the deliverables. And this stayed with them through the life of the project. It was updated, sticky notes were moved, interdependencies were remapped, but it, it just stays with them. We've done similar types of planning using web-based software. In that case, we included the construction manager and the client. It doesn't matter what tools you use. What matters is that you do this type of planning and that you involve everybody up front.

Great.

Moving into the do phase, our QC review process has always been interdisciplinary. This is more a picture of, you know, when we first transitioned. It was redlining of hard copy sets, and then you come together for the QC review meeting, tear apart the sets. Everybody leaves with their, you know, 5, 6, sometimes 7 copies of each drawing with the redlines. It's enough to give anybody a headache. So through continual improvement, we've evolved now to use a web-based software that allows for simultaneous review by all of the reviewers in one PDF set. So they can see each other's comments as they're doing the review, and they actually feed off of each other. So the benefit to the team is they don't get duplicate comments. Everything is legible because it's typed in. There's no scribble. The design team and the reviewers alike can assign comments to others on the team. They can send notifications of, hey, you need to see this comment. And then probably most important in the eyes of ISO is that they can update the status of it. So now instead of the reviewers having to get those crumpled up red lines that are under somebody's desk to say, okay, my comment was picked up, now they just log back in and they can see, okay, because the status has changed to closed and it goes from a red comment to a gray comment. So that they know that everything has been picked up. And then in the check phase, because we're interdisciplinary, we always have so many opportunities to learn from each other. We have, you know, casual sharing, we've got focused sharing, and we have formal sharing of lessons learned. This is an example of the more casual. Our CA group started this on our intranet called What Is It? And I even got in on the action with a post. What is it? But it's really simple. It just starts with a picture from the job site with the hashtag #WhatIsIt, and then the comments start coming in. And there's jokes, there's guesses, you know, nice try, try again, Smurf murder. But in the end, there's always a lesson. It might be, you know, information on a new product. It might be of an installation detail to be wary of. But there's always— there's endless opportunities to learn from the job site. And then a more focused type of lessons learned that we do. This one we did in preparation for a new project. We looked back at the change order history over the past 5 years on similar project types. In this case, it was K-12 schools. And, you know, this was the top-level summary, but departments were also able to drill down and look at the actual change orders. within their discipline. And so they use this information to update their standard details, to update their master specs, information that's being used on projects today. So it was a very important step. And then for formal lessons learned, these we probably do 2 or 3 of these a year. It's kind of at the project manager's discretion. In this case, it was a new project type to us, so we wanted to inform the firm about it because, you know, new project types, there's always tons of lessons learned. In this case, we had some technical information, we had detailing, and then just general words of caution. And we always register these with the AIA for continuing ed credits, so that way attendees and presenters alike can get the continuing ed credits. But I think people would attend regardless of that enticement. So after 22 years, what does it mean to us? I mean, besides the obvious, the plan, do, check, act, it's really, it's just become part of what we do every day, and it's ingrained in our process throughout. This maps out our ISO processes throughout the life of a project. So a lot of people, when they hear quality program, they think of the QC review, and they think it's limited to that. But this is my emphasis that no, it's not. There's so much more to it than that. It starts way before you get the project, and it ends way after the project is over. And after 22 years, it's just what we do.

Yeah, this was eye-opening for me because I was the person that said, yeah, it's QC. It's the person with the hat on, the shirt rolled up, and the red line the whole time. But— and I knew of all these things. I just didn't realize it was part of the ISO ecosystem when I started digging in and understanding it a bit more. So maybe I could help anybody else that kind of knows ISO, maybe not, but these are some of the myths I had in the beginning that Jess has helped me with. So when you adopt an ISO 9000, or when you go for certification, it means that you adopt the 9000 way. They give you the book on how to do it, you read it, you get trained up. They come and certify it, and you're all set to go.

Nope.

No? Okay. Actually, you take this.

Oh, sure. There is no manual. They give you guidelines, and you have to work within these principles. So their principles are customer focus. Despite what you might think, it's not all about you. It's actually all about your client. They're the ones that benefit from the system the most. Leadership needs to provide unity in direction and purpose. You need to make sure that this is woven into your strategic plan. Engagement of people. Engaged people are going to care. They're going to stay that extra 5 minutes to check their work. Relationship management, both within the firm and external to the firm. The 2015 update of ISO really focuses firms— it wants them to look at their context, their ecosystem within which they work and how their quality system plays into that. Process approach, say what you do and do what you say. Continual improvement, not perfection. And evidence-based decision-making, because informed decisions are more likely to yield desired results.

Okay, but to get the certification we need it to be perfect, right? Because we're We're perfect, right?

Nope, wrong again. Because it's based on continual improvement, you're actually better off not being perfect because then there's more room for improvement.

Right.

So every year we leave them with a few things that we know we can improve on and then it makes next year's audit a little easier.

Okay.

So just 'cause our manual looks like this, it doesn't mean that yours will and you just keep working at it.

But this is all well and good, but I don't have to worry about this because I have this really smart colleague, Jess, and she's going to take care of everything for me, right?

Wrong.

Oh, God. Wrong again.

There you go. Yes, ISO needs to belong to the entire firm. You're actually required to establish your quality objectives by function in the firm. So in our case, continual improvement, design excellence, and client satisfaction align with our organizational groups of business practices, design practices, and client development. And then if that's not enough, you also need to set goals, metrics for measuring the success for every level in the firm. So we have firm leadership, project leadership, and project teams. So there are metrics that go behind these, but these are the sections that we look at.

Aligning ISO with business strategy. I feel like I've been to a conference on that at some point in the last year or 2. So last 2 takeaways. I know we're standing between you and lunch, so I'll get through these quickly. Part of the interview process, we got to interview a couple internal leaders. I'm not gonna say their name because they didn't agree to let me share this, so they'll be watching this on video 4 to 6 weeks from now. I'm going to be careful what I say. Leader A, I would describe his management style as directive. He's very well respected. He's extremely focused. He's always in the loop, and he's a very matter-of-fact style that generally works really well in crisis situations, high-stress situations. So he's on one side and Leader B, I would describe his style as more as a coach. He's about people developing, developers, about strong bonds with his team. I would say that if you have next birds, people that have a thirst for learning, they're gonna do really well on his team. So you have 2 people very well respected, clients love them, pace setters within the organization, but stylistically on either side of the spectrum. What was interesting to me and to us, one of the takeaways as we were reading the transcripts from their interviews, is that when we asked them the question about really what does the quality management system mean to you after 20-something years practicing, their answers were extremely similar.

So that's actually the beauty of ISO is that it is one size fits all. Because it's process-driven and not personality-driven, you can still adopt it with all of these varied personalities under the same roof, as long as they're following the same process. And that way the rest of the staff knows what to expect on every project. They know they'll get a work plan. They know they'll get a schedule. They know they'll be followed up with lessons learned at the end of it.

They emphasize the fact that ISO— our QMS is not in the forefront of what we do. We don't talk about it that much, obviously. an example of that. But it's in the background of everything that we do. And you realize that once you pull back and understand what all the processes are. Last thing I'll leave you with is this. This is from a former executive CEO with the firm that I interviewed. And this resonated with me. You know, asked him, what did ISO really do? Tell me in 3 sentences. It forced us to think about how we work. It actually made us document how we wanted to go about doing this stuff. And this last sentence resonated. I think before that, we just had senior people who inherently knew what to do, right? So that's when the KM moment went off for me. And I'd been on this—

Me too.

Yeah, I've been on this critical knowledge transfer journey 2.5, 3 years now. And the thing that keeps me up at night is really thinking about what are all the skills and the behaviors and the knowledge that we're gonna need to make sure that we cultivate and we organize so that we can sustain success moving forward. And so when I read this, I realized, wow, that's what these guys did almost 30 years ago. They didn't wanna leave it up to chance. They wanted to make sure that they were developing a way that they wanted to work and ensuring that it was going to reach the entire firm and not just stay within senior people. So, Really respect that, and it's meant a lot to us. So anyways, thank you for letting us share.

Thank you.