Companies Office leads the way with ISO 9001:2015 certification
In February 2016, the Companies Office became the first organisation in New Zealand to be certified to the new ISO 9001:2015 Quality standards (it’s also the first government agency to be registered with JAS-ANZ). We look at some of the practical changes the Companies Office made to achieve this ground-breaking success.
According to Anita Savelio, Quality Assurance Team Leader at Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), the single biggest change the Companies Office made was to take an inclusive, all-of-business approach, supported by practical, easy-to-use communication tools: “The new standard affected our scope. Whereas previously we concentrated on our core service, it now brought in other business units because those other business units were part of the organisation’s context as outlined in our strategy. This meant that those business units had to be included in our Quality Management System (QMS)”.
“Because of this broader reach, the first practical change we made was to dispense with our quality manual, preferring instead to use our SharePoint intranet as a central platform for communicating our latest news, staff leave, policies, procedures, reports and planning processes”.
This simple, but effective, change was followed by an update of all Companies Office procedures to include end-to-end links (Figure 1 in the Standard). This, they say, was made easy by their use of Promapp software which also meets document control standards (Standard 7.5.3) and keeps interested parties informed of changes via automated emails (Standard 4.2b). The Promapp dashboard reports allow easy monitoring of out-of-date processes that need reviewing and staff are able to provide feedback on the processes.
These processes were then linked to the Companies Office SharePoint intranet, making it easy for staff to have one place to go for all internal information. As Mrs Savelio says, “Our staff work on computers all day, so it was more user-friendly than a manual that they would rarely look at”.
For a QMS to be truly effective — and to meet Standard 5 — management staff need to not only understand the system, but for them to also to take ownership of it. To achieve this, the Companies Office ran an in-house training session with top management as well as team leaders. They also took a quite different approach to the audit itself. Mrs Savelio explains, “Whereas in the past the QA staff responsible for the QMS system would spend the bulk of the audit time updating the auditors about the changes, this time we made sure that our top management team were not only present at the opening of the audit but that they spoke confidently about our strategy, interested parties and how the QMS worked within their teams”.
According to the Companies Office, they were also lucky to have a number of aspects of the new Standards already in place, so it was simply a matter of demonstrating these to the auditors, including: A strategy document that set out their organisation’s context (Standard 4.1); They had identified interested parties and demonstrated that their needs were attended to (Standard 4.2); They were able to show how risk-based thinking had been applied to all their planning processes and that they were able to address risk opportunities to improve (Standard 6.1).
Certification by ISO to this new standard is an important achievement for the Companies Office. Mrs Savelio says, “International scrutiny and endorsement of our robust quality management systems is a vital component in the Companies Office position as the authoritative source of information about New Zealand businesses”.
A version of this article first appeared in the March/April 2016 issue of Quality Business.
