The Quality of Standard, Routine and Nonroutine Processes

Efforts to increase organizational effectiveness using standardization and quality techniques have been successful in repetitive production and administrative processes but less so when dealing with nonroutine processes typical of professional organizations. Routines are defined very broadly in organization theory as either mind-numbing repetition, repositories of knowledge, or effortful accomplishments. In this article, processes are analysed as systems with distinct input assessment, algorithms and output-generating action phases. These are structured differently depending on how they are set up to deal with variation (deviations from explicit targets) and variety (distinct but functionally equivalent targets). Thus processes can be classified into three types. Standard processes are set up to deal with a single variety using binary logic. Routine processes can distinguish a limited amount of variety using fuzzy logic. Nonroutine processes are open systems in which unrestricted variety is interpreted and assigned meaning. The implications of these process types are discussed in terms of the identification of quality errors and defects, change and learning.