A Conversation with the New IAQG President

This episode features a conversation with Eric Jefferies, the newly appointed IAQG President. 

Eric, with a 22-year background in aerospace, shared insights into his journey within the industry and his gradual involvement with IAQG. The discussion highlights IAQG's 25th anniversary and its recognized leadership in global standards for aviation, space, and defense. During the conversation, Eric emphasizes his belief in the need to move beyond publishing standards, exploring opportunities with products like the AIMM tool and the supply chain management handbook or new areas such as training. Eric also outlines the IAQG strategic priorities, focusing on securing confidence, building an ecosystem, enhancing partnerships, prioritizing people, and leveraging IAQG model assets. 

The interview encourages member involvement to shape the future of aerospace quality, emphasizing the exciting opportunities for growth and influence in the coming years. 

Take a listen to learn more.

Transcript

The Quality Horizon – New IAQG President 

Susan Matson: Greetings, everyone, and welcome. You are listening to the quality horizon, the official podcast of the IAQG. I'm your host, Susan Matson. And with me today is Eric Jeffries. Eric is senior manager of process integrity for Bell Textetron. And recently he accepted a two year term as the IAQG president. Congratulations, Eric. And welcome to the show.  

Eric Jefferies: Yeah, thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here.  

Susan Matson: Thank you. New year, new president, perfect time for a conversation, Eric, if we could, I'd like to take this time to give our listeners a little background about you and your history with the IAQG, as well as your thoughts regarding its leadership and the direction for the next two years. 

Susan Matson: Shall we get started?  

Eric Jefferies: Sure.  

Susan Matson: Perfect. Let's start with you. What is your background? Who are you, Eric?  

Eric Jefferies: I've been in aerospace for about 22 years. I actually grew up in a family of aerospace, professionals, people that were commercial pilots, people that worked for other aerospace OEMs.  And I just loved aviation space and defense from a very young age. So I always wanted to be engaged in this industry. 
Susan Matson:  Wonderful. So how did you get started with the IAQG? Did one of your family members introduce you or did it, was that something on the job?   

Eric Jefferies: No, I I didn't know anything at all about the IQG and we had a voting member at the time, a gentleman named Rick Downs, who was the text run voting member on what was at the time the RMC registration management committee that's now turned into the ACOT.  

 Eric Jefferies: And and basically, he just invited me to come and he's hey, you need to get engaged in this. I started going, the 1st year I would say  I just set in the first few meetings I said, and just trying to absorb and figure things out a little bit. And then I just slowly started getting involved and try to get engaged as much as I could. 

Susan Matson:  So getting involved, obviously you didn't jump right into presidency. Did you hold any past positions? What were some of those experiences that you did prior to becoming the president?  

Eric Jefferies: Yeah, I had quite a number of roles. My first step was to replace Rick as the RMC voting member. So I did that for a number of years. And then within that team, I started, taking on volunteer assignments. So I ended up I think for three years, I helped coordinate and plan the annual auditor workshop that the RMC put on. And then I ended up moving into and supporting the auditor review team and ended up leading that team for a couple of years, which led to the next assignment, which was joining the 9104-3 writing team.  

Eric Jefferies: It was happened to be in a rewrite at the time. I worked on that for a couple of years and ended up being placed in the IDR position and supporting that role of retained that well through these other roles that I've had. While that was happening, I started to support some of the international activity and got engaged with the ICOT and then eventually became chair of the ICOT and worked that for several years. 

Eric Jefferies: And that, of course, gave me exposure and a lot of participation at the IAQG level. And that really led into the, my current role. Actually, before then I became the chair of the Americas. So  I did that for a couple of years, and then that led into this role new role as the president of the IAQG. 

Eric Jefferies: It's been a long journey. I learned a ton along the way, and from a lot of very smart people that helped me manage my way through all of these different roles.  

Susan Matson: Sounds like we need to say thanks to Rick. You have been here for a number of years. Why don't we talk about the IAQG? Where do you where do you think we are today?  Last October, celebrated 25 years. So we had a lot of moments of reflection lately. Where do you think we are?  

Eric Jefferies: I think we are the, recognized leader in the development of standards globally for aviation, space and defense. I think our brand is very well known and very well respected amongst our stakeholders. 

Eric Jefferies: We've done a lot of work to to engage, everyone from DCMA to civil aviation authorities around the world NASA. Just all, in each sector really trying to engage those stakeholders to build support. And I think we've come a long way in doing that. But we have a lot of opportunities in front of us, right? 

Eric Jefferies: And we are, even though we're known as that as a global leader in development of standards that help us drive improvement within our industry. We're so much more than standards, right? So I think that's our next area of opportunity because even today, we've got, going beyond standards. 

Eric Jefferies: We have we have our supply chain management handbook, which is a very widely used. Reference library that is provides a tremendous amount of guidance to our members and to our suppliers. We have the AIM tool now to help drive improvement, but I think it's time to build on that, right? 

Eric Jefferies: And we've had such a great deal of success with our previous products that it's time to take them to the next step, right? We need to take action to make sure that we are Maintaining the confidence in the products that we have and improving those products while also starting to introduce new things that create value for our stakeholders and our membership.  

Susan Matson: Absolutely. I know that you just came back from some meetings, from leadership meetings. You're continuing that discussion with the executive committee, and you did touch on this about looking forward and what's on the horizon since we're talking about the quality horizon for the IAQG, but what are some are there some moments that are going to come to fruition? There's a lot of things happening just in this year alone. What are some things that we should be paying attention to that the IAQG is going to be doing this year?  

Eric Jefferies: I see this really as a transitional year for us, because we are  really approaching a time where many of the efforts we've been working on for the last, even 5 years are starting to come to completion which really creates a lot of opportunity for us. But, of course, Oasis, right? We are nearing finalization of OASIS V3 implementation. It is working. There are now thousands of audits in the database we're still making, final improvements and edits, and that'll happen for a while, but that's really coming to a close. 

Eric Jefferies: We've rolled out the SDO process, and we will have our first IA standard published this year very soon. And and we've got others in the pipeline. So that whole new SDO process is really being fully deployed this year. And then, out outside of that, we're talking about where we go next, right? 

Eric Jefferies: So we're looking at other certifiable standards, which we've hinted at for a few years but really haven't implemented anything yet because we've been so focused on OASIS in, in making sure that is, effectively deployed. We're looking at additional training. And so just a whole actually I would characterize it as we're looking how, looking for ways to expand our product portfolio in a way that just brings a value to everyone.  

Eric Jefferies: So lots of opportunities, we have further meetings coming up with the EC next month to finalize some of these things. But back to your question of kind of what came out of the recent EC meeting, we did, confirm that are our strategic priorities they're remaining constant. We put a new set in place last year. That's going to drive us for the next several years. So we have number one on that list is securing confidence in the with robust products and services. So I've already touched on that, but we have a real opportunity to to enhance our current product offerings to bring more value. So that's going to be a focus. We're going to work to build the IAQG ecosystem. That's bringing in some of the new things we've talked about. That's the training. That's everything outside of our existing product portfolio. We are going to continue enhancing our partnerships with our stakeholders. 

Eric Jefferies: And I've already mentioned the listing of who those were, but there's a lot of ongoing improvement happening with it. There's a meeting taking place every month. Somewhere around the world with these entities trying to better understand their needs and what they would see is valuable out of our offerings and then trying to work with them as we develop some of these new ideas to make sure that we're not only driving what our industry needs and driving improvement, but we're trying to align these with the regulatory environment that we operate in and really do so in a way that as we deliver these new products, we have acceptance and confidence from these stakeholders built in. 

 Eric Jefferies: We're going to continue to focus on our people, and I mentioned people like Rick and the people that influenced me, but we have an incredible pool of talent amongst our membership and in our volunteers within our organization. Tremendous expertise. The thing that we're going to focus on is trying to learn, operate more efficiently and learn how to leverage that expertise in a quicker way. 

Eric Jefferies: We need to speed up how fast we release things. And as we Tackle these new product offerings, try to bring them to market faster than we ever had before.  And then finally we're going to expand the influence and leverage the IAQG model assets and resources. And what we mean by that is, now that we're rolling out these. 

Eric Jefferies: For example, Oasis V3, we have a real opportunity to leverage the data in there, not only internally, but to be able to share it with our stakeholders and the users of our end product to help them drive improvement.  We're going to be able to use that data in a way that we never had before. That is going to really give us insight into performance within our industry and what areas we need to target as we focus on these new product developments. 

 Susan Matson: There's a lot there. You mentioned so much and I love the fact that, it's really boiled down to those five and the five that those five strategic direction pillars, if you will, with the securing confidence, the ecosystem, the partnership, the people, the sphere of influence, and being able to leverage that data, there's so much information. 

Susan Matson: IAQG is global and bringing it all together. How do you encapsulate it, analyze it, and then continue to provide the value to the stakeholders, all of them. Thank you anything else you'd like to share? This is your platform to say hello and let people know, for instance, how to get involved or where to find things or anything to that nature.  

Eric Jefferies: No, I think I would just, reiterate that this is a very exciting time for the IAQG and, We have the opportunity to really expand our influence in a way that we haven't, you know, we, we've done great work, like everything that's happened over the last 25 years has been tremendous. 

Eric Jefferies: So I think we have a fantastic opportunity to build on that into. Expand our influence to a degree we've never seen in doing so keeping everybody involved. Going back to those resources and the talent that we have within the IAQG, we're doing this together. And if you're interested in helping us meet those strategic objectives, please get engaged. 

Eric Jefferies: All you need to do is start going to the meetings. There's plenty of work for everybody to do and together we'll make this happen.  

Susan Matson: Thank you, Eric. And as always, great conversation. On behalf of all of our listeners. I do wish you the best in your new position and for the next chapter with the IAQG. Can't wait to see the great things happening. This is Susan Matson and you have been listening to the IAQG Quality Horizon until next time stay safe.