A theme of this year for me has been focusing more and more on the difference between the product integrity focused approach to quality that folks in my profession normally focus in on and a more excellence focused approach. The two are not in opposition, but I can’t help feeling that the product integrity exclusiveness of many pharmaceutical quality professionals is holding us back.

This is especially on my mind coming back from ASQ WCQI and thinking about just how few of my pharma colleagues identify with that organization There are a whole host of reasons (including the fact that many people don’t associate with ANY professional association) but I can’t help but contemplate how do we make the excellence side of quality more relevant to not just pharmaceuticals but to wider questions of just what is quality anyway?

I’ve discussed the need to realize that we have different types of domain knowledges, but just what is this domain we call quality and is it truly its own discipline?

Disciplines can be modeled as a system comprising an “activity scope” that is enabled by a “knowledge base” but conditioned by a “guidance framework”.

• The guidance framework typically involves multiple worldviews. The same subject matter can be studied from different worldviews, and the theories around a given subject can be interpreted differently from different worldview perspectives. You can see this in the various flavors of continuous improvement or better yet, the presence of a sustainability push within the society.
• The knowledge base is the data, theories and methodologies that drive the discipline
• The activity scope describes the range of activities in a disciple, including the professional practice.

We’re probably truly multi-disciplinarian, in that the we draw from multiple other disciplines, a short list includes: Engineering, Computing, Control Theory, Mathematics, Information Theory, Operations research, system theory, Management sciences, a whole range of social sciences and more than I can think.

What does this mean?

I am more thinking aloud than anything at this point, but I think it’s important to work on developing the QBOK along a guidance framework, knowledge base and activity scope methodology. Then as we develop sub-body of knowledges we drill down from there, either in a very knowledge base way (such as the CMQ/OE) or in an activity scope (like the CPGP). I often feel that the way we develop these are more hit-and-miss and could do with some coherence – the biomedical auditor and hazop auditor are great examples of wanting to meet a very narrow need and thus being very very specific to a small set of the knowledge base.

I guess I’m striving towards applying theory to our practice a little more deliberately.

Some of the technical forums (Human Development and Leadership comes to mind) seem especially designed to pull information from one or two different originating disciplines and adapt it to the knowledge base. I think this process would be added by a coherent understanding of our guidance framework and just what the activity scope we are trying to address as discipline.

In short I am just thinking that a little more coherence, strategy and transparency would aid us as a profession. As I heard in many a conversation last week, we should probably as an organization be better at what we preach.

Sources

• Bourke, J (2014). On Process Excellence vs. Operational Excellence vs. Business Excellence. BEX Institute.
• Rousseau, D., Wilby, J., Billingham, J., & Blachfellner, S. (2016). A Typology for the Systems Field. Systema 4(1), 15-47
• Wageeh, N. A. (2016). The Role of Organizational Agility in Enhancing Organizational Excellence: A Study on Telecommunications Sector in Egypt. International Journal of Business and Management, 11(4), 121