Quality Management – Records

Again no hints of the organisation(s) where this issue has sparked a bit of a campaign.

I see lots of people doing good things in their organisations, but for many they forget that sometime in the future they may need to look back to what they have done. When contracts are reviewed, authorisation of major spend or design activity etc. I see so many organisations keeping the key records in personal e-mail. Now, I accept that for most organisations this stuff is backed up but for me the question is how are you going to find it? This is a real practical problem that has many relatively simple solutions.

As always I go back to ISO 9001 – A documented procedure shall be established to define the controls needed fo the identification, storage, protection, retrieval, retention time and disposition of records.

Do I need to make this more simple? So just do what it says…

Another Day Another Management System

Today was a Stage 2 Assessment of a small company quite local to where I live (Monmouth South Wales). This was part of my work for LRQA as an independent subcontractor. My own company is Ashton Management System Services Ltd – a bit of a mouthful but we do what it says on the tin – provide services to my client’s management system. Much of my work is as a assessor for LRQA covering ISO 9001 and ISO27001.

Still, what about today. Obviously no customer details but I reckon I always learn something from an assessment or audit. Today was no exception.

Small firms always stretch the boundaries of ISO 9001, but there is always a way of working that conforms to the standard, without excessive bureaucracy and still adds value to the business. The simple message is that in managing business relationships, having a clear understanding of the requirements can only be a good thing. This is one of the common threads in ISO 9001 but one that is too often a bit of a failing. There is the tendency to leave things just a bit too informal and this can so easily lead to mistakes.