Performance evaluation (ISO 9001:2015 Clause 9)

When our local swimmer and fly specialist Joseph Schooling won a bronze at the swimming World Championships in 2015, it was considered a sensational moment in Singapore sport. Two years later, the same medal colour carries far less shine.

The one-sided result – the winner Caeleb Dressel was almost a second faster than Schooling and the Singaporean's time was 0.44sec off his personal best. In swimming, every split second counts and our poster boy has failed to repeat his stunt after winning last year's historic first Olympic gold for our country.

Schooling acknowledged his podium finish in Saturday's 100m butterfly final as "a setback" as he went into this meet with high expectations (targeting wins in the 50m fly, which he finished fifth, and the 100m fly which he finished third in a tie with British swimmer James Guy).


Schooling’s coach, Eddie Reese, the 76-year-old head coach at the University of Texas, where Schooling studies and trains should be busy right now analysing his charge’s performance and determining what had gone wrong and draft the next course of actions. This is akin to a post-mortem after an internal or external audit to determine the action plan to fix an organization’s quality management system.

Performance evaluation should be a continuous process to evaluate the effectiveness of an organization’s quality management system. The Standard states clearly the requirements for organizations to determine what, when, how to measure performance. The only issue is ‘who’ is responsible to do this as this clause does not specify who?

The simplistic solution to above issue is to document a plan (Clause 6.2.2) to achieve quality objectives established. The requirements for this plan has all the elements of what will be done, what resources will be required, who will be responsible, when will it be completed and lastly, how the results will be evaluated.

Without doubt, the performance of an organization’s quality management system depends on how well its quality objectives are relevantly defined at critical functional levels and key processes. While it’s relatively easy to set objectives, organizations should consider setting leading indicators than lagging ones as these help organizations to implement and take actions to prevent unwanted events, accidents, high scraps, etc. Someone has to be appointed and responsible to analyse performance results and take appropriate actions.  

Who is this person in your organization?