What are the best practices for process audits and reviews to ensure quality?

1 Define your audit and review objectives

Before you start any process audit or review, you need to have a clear purpose and scope for your evaluation. What are the goals and expectations of your process design project? What are the quality standards and criteria that you need to meet? How will you measure and report your findings and recommendations? By defining your objectives, you can plan your audit and review activities, select the appropriate methods and tools, and communicate your expectations to your stakeholders.

2 Choose the right audit and review methods

When conducting process audits and reviews, you can use various methods and tools based on your objectives. Document review is one such method, which involves checking process documentation for accuracy, completeness, and consistency. Observation entails watching the process in action to evaluate its performance, inputs, and outputs. Interviews involve asking questions to stakeholders to gain feedback on the process. Surveys are sent out to a sample of participants or beneficiaries to collect data on the process. Lastly, testing applies scenarios, inputs, or conditions to verify the process' functionality, reliability, and robustness.

3 Follow a structured audit and review process

To ensure systematic, consistent, and reliable process audits and reviews, you should follow a structured process that covers planning, preparing, executing, analyzing, reporting, and following-up. Planning involves defining the objectives, scope, criteria, methods, tools, schedule, roles, and responsibilities. Preparing involves collecting and reviewing relevant process documentation and data. Executing involves conducting audit and review activities such as document review or testing. Analyzing involves identifying root causes of any gaps or inefficiencies. Reporting involves summarizing the results and presenting them to stakeholders. Finally, follow-up involves monitoring the implementation of recommendations and evaluating the outcomes of process improvement actions.

4 Involve the right people

Process audits and reviews are not only technical exercises, but also collaborative ones. Therefore, it is important to involve the right people who can provide valuable insights, feedback, and support for your process design quality. Process owners are responsible for the overall performance, quality, and improvement of the process; they can provide the vision, goals, and expectations of the project. Process operators have the practical and operational knowledge of the process; they can offer technical knowledge and experience. Process customers receive the output or outcome of the process; they can give insight into needs, requirements, and satisfaction levels. Lastly, process auditors and reviewers conduct audit and review activities; they can provide an objective, independent, and expert assessment and evaluation of the process design quality.

5 Implement continuous improvement

Process audits and reviews are not one-time events, but rather ongoing practices that help you monitor, measure, and improve your process design quality. You should conduct regular process audits and reviews, either at predefined intervals or triggered by specific events, such as changes, incidents, or feedback. You should also use the audit and review findings and recommendations as inputs for your process improvement initiatives, such as applying the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, Lean Six Sigma methodology, or other quality management tools and techniques. By implementing continuous improvement, you can ensure that your process design quality is always aligned with your goals, standards, and customer expectations.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?