Exciting Speaking Opportunity: "The Power of a Specification" at CCSQA/NERCSQA Joint Annual Meeting Fall 2025


I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be presenting at the CCSQA/NERCSQA Joint Annual Meeting in October!

The conference is 2 days, Thursday & Friday, 16-17 October 2025, in Laval, Quebec, Canada. On-site and virtual attendance available. Here's the announcement link: https://sqa.org/CCSQA/CCSQA/Events/Upcoming_Events.aspx

My session is on Friday morning, and titled "The power of a specification: Freeing your creative self to go beyond compliance."

Here's the abstract:

As busy quality professionals it's sometimes easy to get trapped into checkbox compliance, spending creative energy on routine verification rather than innovative problem-solving. This session shows how good specifications can actually free up your creativity by clearly separating what you must do from what you can do.

These specifications work like guardrails - they keep you safe while giving you room to innovate. They set clear minimum standards, let you automate testing, and free up your time for more important quality work.

I'll demonstrate a practical framework combining static analysis with a creative agent to iteratively improve designs while maintaining compliance. You'll see a working example of how writing testable requirements can make procedures better, faster, especially with the new tools AI makes available to us every day.

Instead of limiting your options, specifications become the foundation that enables both ongoing compliance and innovation.

I hope to see some of you there!

– Brendan

p.s. Enjoy this message? Read more at the Hyland Quality Systems website.

The HaiQu Newsletter

I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every week as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.

Read more from The HaiQu Newsletter

I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly: Instrument data is saved as an Excel or CSV. Data is then copied to a bare-bones spreadsheet with several columns of calculations or transformations. Results from the spreadsheet’s calculations are copied for use further down the data analysis pipeline. And I, the auditor, get handed a signed and dated pdf of the worksheet. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe Here! Why yes, M. Inspector, this spreadsheet was validated! Ok, they are rarely this bad - I...

The Spreadsheet Risk Reduction Guide

Calling quality people everywhere! I've just released something I think you'll find useful. Over the past 20 years working in regulated environments, I've seen the same spreadsheet problems show up again and again: A quick Excel tool gets built to solve an immediate need. It works. Gets "validated" with a few hand calculations. Then gets reused and modified for different datasets or slightly different purposes. Eventually - sometimes months or years later - someone discovers an error. Or an...

It’s the first step of the problem solving framework that I was taught back in Engineering school. Not ‘Plan’. Not “Define”. “I want to and I can”. That particular framework - the McMaster Six Step - never gained the popularity of the ones now used today, but in the end they all contain the same basic elements - research, planning & design, implementation, evaluation and iteration - just stated in different ways. However I’ve never really seen this particular element called out explicitly...