Compliance of your Compliance

Who audits the auditor, assures the assurers, ensures compliance complies? Many companies and organisations have multi-level auditing and assurance processes, however often have different lenses for focus, i.e. the operational audit, the business process audit, management audit. Particularily apparent in operational or technical audits, how most companies ensure compliance is testing against the same criteria, even if the criteria is no longer relevant to business objectives. This just creates waste, through costly and timely process - for smaller companies taking significant time of key personnel, for larger companies carrying significant overheads and inefficiencies. 

Traceability and transparency is key to all activities. Systems engineering approaches used readily in aerospace, aviation, nuclear and other high risk industries know the risk of getting things wrong, hence over decades have developed approaches that have traceability and transparency inbuilt within a continuous improvement methodology. 

Can you guarantee all of your compliance checks are up to date? Complying with the current international, national or internal company standards? This is a challenge for many organisations and is often left to the person completing the audits to ensure it is correct. When compliance or audit templates exist in systems that are not easily adaptable, auditors often end up auditing to dated criteria, sometimes non-consequential, other times with consequences.

Auditing the auditor or ensuring compliance activities are relevant, correct and up to date is essential to get value from your assurance and compliance activities.