How can you conduct an inclusive quality audit?

Title: The Inclusive Audit: A Quick Guide Conducting quality audits? Elevate your process with inclusivity: 1. Diverse Team: - Form a team with varied backgrounds for fair decisions. 2. Training: - Educate on diversity for unbiased auditing. 3. Inclusive Planning: - Collaborate for objectives reflecting diverse concerns. 4. Inclusive Criteria: - Expand beyond traditional measures. 5. **Interviews and Surveys:** - Craft clear, neutral questions accessible to all. 6. Accessible Documentation: - Ensure clarity for everyone involved. Enhance audits, embrace diversity, and foster a culture of inclusivity for sustained success.

The planning phase of an audit is important and should not be under-estimated. It is during this time that the auditors would work together with the auditees to find out more about the processes undertaken by the latter. Once the preliminary understanding is obtained, it would allow the auditors to have a clearer picture. This would then be compared with the risk assessment performed for the auditee and the result of which would be one where the focus would be placed on the high risk areas. Often this is crucial because the audit resource is limited. Hence, efforts should be zeroed in on the key areas in order to achieve a reasonable quality audit.

The composition of the audit team is indeed important as the members are the ones who will execute the audit. One of the ways to allocate the audit areas is based on experience, where the more complex tasks should be assigned to the more experienced auditors. However, as part of training, a complex area can be allocated to a junior auditor, but with a senior staff providing guidance to the latter. Apart from the technical aspects, the attitude and motivation of an auditor are important, as after all, we are dealing with fellow human beings who are our colleagues. The intention of the auditors must be to help to improve the overall governance of the organisation versus fault finding. It is only then that the auditees would reciprocate.

Nowadays there are many tools to perform audits. However, having the tools itself without knowing how to use them properly may not elicit the results that the audit is intended to achieve. Before using any tools, the top most important task is to understand the processes, including the relevant policies and procedures, laws and regulations, affecting the entity. This part, if not done properly, would have repercussions on the findings raised. The latter can be biased or reflect an incomplete picture of the existing scenario. This would inadvertently cause the auditees to rebutt the issues. When such situation arises, this would then affect the confidence of Management on the competency of the audit team. The result is a lose-lose situation.

When I conducted automotive warranty audits, I made sure to discuss each case not only the country distributors, but where practical, with the workshops too. This sometimes included talking directly with the technicians. In this way, everybody knows what went wrong and how they can do better.

Have seen many instances where auditors were able to perform the audit but the audit findings were communicated poorly. The audit report represents the hard work of the auditors and to do justice for the work done, this has to be properly prepared not just in the auditor's point of view, but more importantly, how the auditees would react when they see the writeup. Having more is not necessarily good and a succinct and to-the-point approach is recommended. Wordy paragraphs could be replaced by charts, graphs and tables, so that the auditees can grasp the point easily just by looking at the pictures and data presented. The ultimate aim is that the auditees can understand the problems by reading the report and they know how to resolve them.