Open Letters
Have you got any questions or opinions you would like to share? Make yourself heard and send us your feedback
Adding value all over the world
I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed INform (Issue 3) - particularly Competence and training by Stephen Russell, which I passed along to our HR director who also found it informative, and Is your audit adding value? by the APG.
I am a registered auditor, and am also employed full time with a multinational company as their lead auditor. As such I visit various states in the USA, eastern Europe, the Caribbean and, in the future, China. Value adding audits are an important subject to me since we are working all over the world, and crossing national and cultural lines. Trying to get the object of an audit across in a way that makes sense can be a difficult task. Thank you for the helpful advice.
Joseph Lynch
The big ISO 9001 debate
People always have plenty to say about ISO 9001 - and they don't always agree. Never let it be said that INform is afraid of getting its hands dirty: here, Jim Wade, director of Advanced Training, and Colin Partington, training and development manager at NQA, battle it out over the ether.
CP: I write in response to your article in INform (issue 4: www.irca.org/inform/issue3/jwade.htm) regarding internal audits.
To say that ISO 9001 does not require internal audits to be performed is strange, the copy I have states (under clause 8.2.2) 'The organization shall conduct internal audits'. I believe that the word 'shall' makes it mandatory.
JW: Some UKAS-accredited suppliers of certification services allow some of their ISO 9001:2000 registered organizations to avoid conducting internal audits.
This is achieved by allowing the organizations to study clause 8.2.2 and to devise alternative ways, better suited to their business needs, to address its requirements. In my view this is a good thing. It is certainly seen as an excellent thing by the user organizations concerned, since they are relieved of a tiresome, costly and unnecessary burden.
CP: In your article you also forget to mention that the clause requires the organization to check that the system is 'effectively implemented and maintained'. Good training organizations have been encouraging their delegates to seek improvement, not just compliance, for years. Likewise, to say that it is a new requirement of ISO 9001 to check against the standard also demonstrates a lack of understanding of how good training organizations have been working for a long time.
You have a lot of great ideas on quality but I question why you have to be negative towards the standard and choose to ignore what other organizations are really doing in order to get your point across.
JW: I am not particularly negative towards ISO 9000. But I am admittedly deeply concerned about its implementation - specifically the habitually inappropriate emphasis on ISO 9001 clauses 4 to 8, ignoring the rest of the body of knowledge (currently a total of thirteen standards and guidelines). This emphasis is completely at odds with the ISO 9000 concept.
You dispute my assertion that the requirement to check the degree of conformity with the requirements of ISO 9001 was newly introduced to internal audits by ISO 9001:2000. I stand by what I wrote and refer you to ISO 9001:1994 clause 4.17.
CP: Our thoughts on ISO 9001 are not a million miles apart, we just have different ways of expressing our views, which I believe is healthy. I am always pleased to see people 'challenge the norm' as it makes us look at ourselves and seek to improve. One particular point of agreement is that of how the standard is applied. I don't believe that this makes it a bad standard - put a bad driver in a good car and you have a problem.
I still stand by my point that internal audits are mandatory - we can adjust the words but we still have to perform the function. There are many ways of achieving this goal which suit certain organizations better than the traditional style of internal auditing - which is already done by some organizations.
You may be pleasantly surprised by how many organizations have adopted a good mechanism for performing internal audits for which they get considerable benefits and do not see it as a tiresome, costly and unnecessary burden. But I do concede, many do not. Unfortunately, many of those who do not get the benefits have not undergone adequate training and so are simply following bad advice on what they 'have to do'. Many of the problems are, I believe, down to ignorance.
Finally, I did not disagree with the fact that auditing against the standard was a new requirement in the standard. I stated that some of us had been training delegates to audit against it for years. And to answer your question regarding checking effectiveness - we should look at the outputs from a process and verify that it is producing a satisfactory input for the next process. Hopefully this is also tied into objectives, but we should still verify it whether there are objectives or not.
Any views on this page are entirely those of Colin Partington and not the NQA.
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