The threat of being fired was seemingly not enough to motivate the leaders of this island’s top statutory corporations to attend an ISO 9001 town hall meeting put on by the fledgling Solutions Barbados last Wednesday.
Party officials were greeted with an empty hall when they turned up at the Combermere School to present the latest quality management system standard of the Geneva, Switzerland-based International Organization for Standardization.
It was just four days prior that the leader of the two-year-old party Grenville Phillips II had told those attending the party’s public launch in Independence Square that ISO 9001, “can solve most, if not all, of our nation’s management issues”.
Therefore, he said if Solutions Barbados were elected, it would be made mandatory for the Barbados Revenue Authority, Barbados Water Authority, Licensing Authority, National Petroleum Corporation, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Sanitation Service Authority and Transport Board to adopt this system.
“You are all on notice,” Phillips had said then in reference to the top brass of each entity.
“I am calling on you to start implementing the ISO 9001 quality management system for the benefit of your long-suffering employees and the long-suffering public or your contracts will not be renewed in a Solutions Barbados administration,” he added.
However, the tough talk seemed to have little sway on the management of these entities, as Wednesday’s event had to be postponed due to a no show by members of the target audience with organizers promising to broadcast it at a later date on Facebook.
A disappointed Phillips chided the executives, arguing that they would much rather spend large sums of money to learn the very same material that his party was offering free of cost.
“As all Barbadians who access public service know, the management of the delivery of this service is very poor and this was an opportunity for them to learn about the system. Rather than paying half of a million dollars to a consultant they could have learnt all of this for free,” he said, adding that “we will have to now take a lot of the information and put it on our Facebook page so that at least the employees can start to gain some knowledge of the system”.
“The Barbados public service used to be really good, it was probably excellent because of the quality of persons that we had. In the first ten years of our independence we had very qualified persons therefore you didn’t need an ISO 9001 management system because the persons were very qualified. The problem is that a lot of these persons have gone,” the Solutions Barbados leader stressed.
Fret not Grenville. Pharaoh was stiff-necked too.
Fret not Grenville. Pharaoh was stiff-necked too.
Where the pursuit of justice and righteousness are at the core of your struggle, you become invincible… ‘night does run till day ketch it’!
Keep fighting the good fight of faith Solutions Barbados!… Great things can and have very often come from humble beginnings. No greater testimony exists to this truth than the seemingly humble beginnings of a certain baby boy in a Bethlehem manger!!!
Where the pursuit of justice and righteousness are at the core of your struggle, you become invincible… ‘night does run till day ketch it’!
Keep fighting the good fight of faith Solutions Barbados!… Great things can and have very often come from humble beginnings. No greater testimony exists to this truth than the seemingly humble beginnings of a certain baby boy in a Bethlehem manger!!!