Curiosity

To foster a culture of adaptability, engagement, and high performance on your team, you need to demonstrate consistent curiosity about your employees, yourself, and your organization. Here’s how:

  • Curiosity about employees. Organizations are a collection of the mindsets, attitudes, and values of the people that work within them. To shape your team’s culture, you need to understand people’s values and motivations. Talk to employees directly, formally survey them, or engage in focus groups about the team’s culture to tap into your collective wisdom.
  • Curiosity about yourself. As your culture evolves, you must too. Reflect with open-mindedness on your own role. Ask yourself: How have I evolved over time within this team and this organization? The better you understand your own position in the culture, the better suited you’ll be to lead and shape it.
  • Curiosity about the organization. Great leaders don’t just shape culture once—they stay curious about the changing nature of their companies and contexts over time. How have your organization’s mission, vision, and values changed? How has the personnel changed? And how have all of these factors affected the culture along the way? The more you understand your cultural context, the better equipped you’ll be to navigate it.
  • Curiosity about the domain: What are the changes in your field? What is current research? Regulatory shifts? Best practices? The more you understand the external landscape, the better equipped you are to establish a vision of excellence.
Happy little boy holding glass with soap foam by David Pereiras from Noun Project (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

ISO 9000 and 10000 Series and Quality Culture

At the SQA’s Quality College, I presented a workshop on Quality Culture. In interests of time, I glossed over the ISOs and wanted to come back and treat them in more detail.

ISO 9000 is a set of international standards on quality management and quality assurance developed to help companies effectively document the quality system elements needed to maintain an efficient quality system. Designed to be general in approach, they are not specific to any one industry and can be applied to organizations of any size.

There are some 25 series 9000 standards, with the core for this topic being:

  • ISO 9000 Quality management systems -Fundamentals and vocabulary
  • ISO 9001 Quality management systems – Requirements
  • ISO 9004 Managing for the sustained success of an organization – A quality management approach

The ISO 10000 series supports standards in the ISO 9000 series with more specific guidelines, there are several here relevant to the question of Quality Culture:

  • ISO 10010 Quality management — Guidance to understand, evaluate and improve organizational quality culture
  • ISO 10015 Quality Management – Guidelines for competence management and people development Training
  • ISO 10018 Quality Management – Guidelines on People Involvement and Competence

Where I am at

I recently joined Just Evotec Biologics as the Senior Director of Global Quality Engineering and Validation. For a variety of reasons (just look at my past company on my LinkedIn bio and search the news to find one) it was a good time to move. I had decided that I wanted a position that was tied to an innovative manufacturing company and was deep in domain expertise. The combination of Just Evotec Biologics innovative technology aims and the ability to deep dive into one of my favorite topics was just too much to resist. Add to it the opportunity to work with a leader I deeply respected again and well, here I am. And feeling very good about it.

When I first started I met with the team and laid out my 30-60-90 day goals.

As well as talking a little about how I operate.

A big chunk of my time has been getting the lay-of-the-land institutionally. Setting some standards, doing gap assessments, figuring out what-is-what, and getting to know all my partners and stakeholders. For reasons of confidentiality, this post won’t be going deep on that.

What I do want to talk about is our team values and ways of working. I’ve been focused heavily on three areas with the team:

  1. Team Values
  2. Team Decision Making
  3. Team Competencies

Team Values

We did a few workshops where we identified a set of values:

  1. Leader to Team: How I expect the team to perform
  2. Team to Leader: How the Team expects me to perform
  3. Team to Team: How we expect each other to perform

This exercise really helped me understand what was going on within the team and through it I really started to understand some priorities.

For each of these, we created a Value Statement. Here are some examples.

Value: United Front

Definition: Decisions are made and recorded honestly and transparently. Employees understand decisions and how to execute them. The entire team represents the decisions made, and the decision-making process with one voice. 

Desired Behaviors:

  1. I hold myself accountable for representing the decisions made by the team.
  2. I work to anticipate and fend off the possibility of failures occurring.
  3. I engage with decision making and respect the decisions that result.

Value: Open to Change

Definition: Willingness to listen to the team.  Actively looking for feedback and input from the team before making decisions that impact the team.  Open to changing established ways and revisiting previously made decisions.  

Desired Behaviors:

  1. I will be transparent with decision-making.
  2. I will create an environment where new ideas are welcome and challenging ideas are encouraged.
  3. I will include the team in decision-making where applicable.
  4. I will actively seek out individual and group feedback to enable continuous improvements.

Value: Learning Culture

Definition: Share lessons learned from projects so team can grow together and remain aligned.  Engage in knowledge-sharing sessions.

Desired Behaviors:

  1. I will share lessons learned from each project with the wider QEV team via teams channel &/or weekly team meetings.
  2. I will encourage team members to openly share their experiences, successes, and challenges without fear of judgement.
  3. I will update RAID log with decisions made by the team.
  4. I will identify possible process improvements and update the process improvement tracker 

Team Decision Making

Currently working with the team to define decision-making, introducing the RAPID model and working on a matrix of decisions.

Team Competencies

Starting with technical skills we are defining our core competencies. Next, we will tackle, with the larger quality organization, the soft skill side of the equation. This is definitely a work in progress.

Skill Area

Key Aspects

Proficiency Levels

 

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced

Expert

General CQV Principles

       Modern process validation and guidance 

       Validation design and how to reduce variability

       Able to review a basic protocol

       Able to review/approve Validation document deliverables.

       Understands the importance of a well-defined URS.

       Able to be QEV lead in a small project

       Able to answer questions and guide others in QEV

       Participates in process improvement

       Able to review and approve RTM/SRs

       Able to be QEV lead in a large project project

       Trains and mentors others in QEV

       Leads process improvement initiatives

       Able to provide Quality oversight on the creation of Validation Plans for complex systems and/or projects

       Sets overall CQV strategy

       Recognized as an expert outside of JEB

Facilities and Utilities

       Oversee Facilities, HVAC and Controlled Environments

       Pharma Water and WFI

       Pure Steam, Compressed Air, Medical Gases

       Understands the principles and GMP requirements

       Applies the principles, activities, and deliverables that constitute an efficient and acceptable approach to demonstrating facility fitness-for-use/qualification

       Guide the Design to Qualification Process for new facilities/utilities or the expansion of existing facilities/utilities

       Able to establish best practices

Systems and Equipment

       Equipment, including Lab equipment

       Understands the principles and GMP requirements

       Principles, activities, and deliverables that constitute an efficient and acceptable approach to demonstrating equipment fitness-for-use/qualification

       Able to provide overall strategy for large projects

       Able to be QEV lead on complex systems and equipment.

       Able to establish best practices

Computer Systems and Data Integrity

       Computer lifecycle, including validation

       Understands the principles and GMP requirements

       Able to review CSV documents

       Apply GAMP5 risk based approach

       Day-to-day quality oversight

       Able to provide overall strategy for a risk based GAMP5 approach to computer system quality

       Able to establish best practices

Asset Lifecycle

       Quality oversight and decision making in the lifecycle asset lifecycle: Plan, acquire, use, maintain, and dispose of assets 

       Can use CMMS to look up Calibrations, Cal schedules and PM schedules

       Quality oversight of asset lifecycle decisions

       Able to provide oversight on Cal/PM frequency

       Able to assess impact to validated state for corrective WO’s.

       Able to establish asset lifecycle for new equipment classes

       Establish risk-based PM for new asset classes

       Establish asset lifecycle approach

Quality Systems

       SOP/WI and other GxP Documents

       Deviation

       Change Control

       Able to use the eQMS

       Deviation reviewer (minor/major)

       Change Control approver

       Document author/approver

       Deviation reviewer (critical)

       Manage umbrella/Parent changes

       Able to set strategic direction

Cleaning, Sanitization and Sterilization Validation

       Evaluate and execute cleaning practices, limit calculations, scientific rationales, and validation documents 

       Manage the challenges of multi-product facilities in the establishment of limits, determination of validation strategies, and maintaining the validated state

       Differentiate the requirements for cleaning and sterilization validation when using manual, semi-automatic, and automatic cleaning technologies

       Review protocols

       Identify and characterize potential residues including product, processing aids, cleaning agents, and adventitious agents

       Understand Sterilization principles and requirements 

       Create, review and approve scientifically sound rationales, validation protocols, and reports

       Manage and remediate the pitfalls inherent in cleaning after the production of biopharmaceutical and pharmaceutical products

       Define cleaning/sterilization validation strategy to meet GMP requirements

Quality Risk Management

       Apply QRM principles according to Q9

       Participate in a risk assessment

       Determine appropriate tools

       Establish risk-based decision-making tools

       Set risk-based approaches

       Define risk management program for CQV activities

 

I’d love feedback on this.

My Overall Philosophy

I’ve been focusing on five key tasks as a leader in this organization:

  1. How I build and gain agreement
  2. Grow the Team
  3. Results and Learning
  4. Deliberate Presence
  5. Prioritizing the Right Relationship

Still a lot to do but I am having a blast.