Internal audit is one area of the standard often met with dread. The word audit is often associated with negative connotations, either as a fault-finding exercise or even a tick in the box to appease an external auditor. Both of these scenarios are less than ideal.
If you are on the certification journey, the best thing you can do is make sure your internal audit is value add and efficient for your organisation.
Here are 7 tips to consider:
Approach your organisation from a process perspective, determine what key activities are undertaken from determining customer requirements through to product delivery. Think outside the box for this and take into consideration areas such as HR and IT support.
Identify any external requirements that are critical for your processes such as legislation, codes of practice, and client contracts. These can form the basis for some of your audit criteria.
For each of your critical activities and processes, determine what really matters. This will be your guide for determining the scope of the audit (the audit boundaries) as well as what the audit criteria will be.
Decide on your audit methodology - this could be file reviews, staff interviews, sampling product, document and process reviews. Make sure you record this information as part of your audit planning process.
Decide how often you are going to audit your processes, this will be dependent on the level of risk to the organisation, your organisation size and your resourcing constraints. Make sure you set up a visible schedule for this, as the standards do require audits are undertaken at determined intervals.
Allocate your audits to appropriately trained staff - they need to be impartial (you can't audit your own work unfortunately) and they do need to understand the area they are auditing.
Monitor the program, make sure your audits are actually happening and that any audit results are reported to management.
A good internal audit should be picking up issues in your systems and processes. Always be open to reviewing how you audit and what you are auditing so that you keep up with any organisational changes.
CertCrowd is a great solution that allows you to schedule and track internal audit easily, as well as manage actions from your audit activity!
May your internal audits be value add and useful to your organisation.
