Organizations should audit processes associated with top management as part of an effective internal audit program. These processes include those related to strategic planning, setting policies and objectives, ensuring effective communication, and ensuring the availability of resources.
Auditing of management or directors is often considered a sensitive subject, but by viewing each managerial activity as a normal organizational process, it becomes much easier to focus on determining whether the results of your activities are effective.
How to audit senior management
By using a formal risk-based approach to internal audit planning, as required by ISO 9001, auditors have a great opportunity to involve top management in the audit process. By making management part of the planning process and giving them ownership of the areas to be audited, internal auditing becomes a valuable development tool.
A good starting point is to copy all the requirements from the standard that say “top management shall” into the audit checklist, almost all clauses in section 5 begin with “top management shall” and it is the job of the auditor to find out if the address “did”. ‘. The audit checklist must cover the requirements of the following sections:
5.1 Management Commitment
5.2 Customer focus
5.3 Quality Policy
5.4.1 Quality objectives
5.4.2 Planning of the Quality Management System
5.5.1 Responsibility and Authority
5.5.2 Management representative
5.5.3 Internal Communication
5.6 Management review
5.6.1 General
During the Internal Audit
When performing the internal audit of top management, the auditor should collect and corroborate evidence of top management commitment within the quality management system itself. The auditor should ask how the quality manual addresses management commitment issues and how they are achieved; then the auditor must find objective evidence to show that it is actually being done. This method applies to both management and the production machinist, and everyone else in the organization for that matter!
If the standard and documented procedures, policies, and objectives are audit inputs, then the sampled evidence and interview statements made by senior management auditees are the audit outputs. If the input does not align with the expected output, the auditor simply declares this misalignment a nonconformity while providing an audit trail to the supporting evidence.
Final report
Auditors should prepare the internal audit report in a manner appropriate for presentation. It may be necessary to present the executive summary of the audit report directly to senior management and other interested parties within the organization. The executive summary should highlight both positive and negative findings and suggest opportunities for improvement.