Improve your current internal audit practices

Organizations with an existing internal audit programme should review their results to ensure audit objectives are being met and to identify opportunities for improvement.

Ask yourself the following questions:

•             Are our internal audit plans and schedules being met?

•             Do our plans focus on customer satisfaction?

•             How well are departments meeting their requirements?

•             Are we identifying the root cause of the problem?

•             Are our internal auditors writing good audit reports?

•             Are non-conformities written clearly and simply to be easily understood?

•             Are we giving compliments for good practices?

•             Are we identifying opportunities for improvement?

•             How long is it taking to close audit corrective actions?

•             What feedback are we receiving about our audits?

•             Are we looking at the whole organization as one entity?

Use the update of your internal audit process as an opportunity to take corrective and preventive actions and find the root cause of the problem.  It’s a good idea to have training sessions with your auditors to go over previously written non-conformity statements and identify what clause references have been used.

Top tip: Follow these 6 C’s for well written statements

•             Complete – include the specified requirement and objective evidence

•             Correct – take care to accurately and correctly convey the information

•             Concise – express the statement as briefly and succinctly as possible

•             Clear – use easy to understand words and terminology

•             Categorized – if used, identify its severity (major, minor, or concern)

•             Confirmed – verify the information needed for corrective action is stated

Of course, internal auditors must prepare reports as prescribed by their own audit procedure. Remember to audit for conformity (not non-conformity) and to share some positive comments in reports to encourage improved conformance.

Schedule your internal audits differently

The purpose of an internal audit programme is to plan the type and number of audits, as well as, to identify and provide the necessary resources to conduct them.

The plan-do-check-act model can be applied to the management of internal audits:

  • Plan: define the audit programme
  • Do: implement the audit programme
  • Check: review the audit programme
  • Act: improve the audit programme

Auditors must understand how the clause structure and requirements will affect their audit plans. Instead of auditing by clause, the organization may decide to audit by processes and across the organization.

Top tip: look at requirements from multiple clauses to fully assess a particular activity

Organizing audits by clause may limit the evaluation to just a subset of the planning, doing, checking, and acting requirements for a process.

Another method of auditing is to trace customer requirements as an input and the delivery of the product or service as an output, in order to assess department interfaces. Audits can also be scheduled for a specific contract or project to only assess the involved areas.

Remember that key business processes tend to flow across the organization and hence may touch on many activities and departments. Other processes may flow more vertically within the organization. For this reason alone it is very important to understand the interfaces within your business processes and sub-processes and plan your audits accordingly.

This article is an extract from BSI's ISO 9001 Internal Audit Tips.
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