IRCA members urged to comment on ISO 19011

British and international standards play a central role in the lives of many CQI and IRCA members. They provide frameworks for the development and operation of corporate management systems, set requirements and offer guidance for those undertaking audits and baseline good practice in a diverse and extensive range of business activities.  

The CQI has an enviable record of contributing to the development of such standards, indeed, the CQI’s comment provision is often greater than that of many national bodies/countries. 

For this reason, the CQI is invariably successful in securing Category A Liaison status for those standards which it believes its membership will have a particular interest in (we refer to these as CQI approved standards). 

Category A Liaison status means that the CQI is not required to simply comment from afar, but is instead granted a seat at the table when these standards are being developed.   

Each CQI approved standard is assigned to a specific member of the CQI Standards Panel. It is their responsibility to communicate the CQI’s position to their fellow standard developers. 

Historically, the CQI position has been informed by the carrying out of sample surveys — perhaps asking members to provide feedback on five or six headline topics relating to the proposed new document. 

For all its simplicity, this approach meant that if an individual had a concern relating to a subject area other than those contained within the survey, there was limited scope to raise it.

This is about to change. The CQI has launched a new ICT solution which will allow members to comment on any aspect of a standard, at the most detailed of levels. 

This system is called the CQI Standards Commenting System (SCS) and it has been designed in such a way that the results can be directly uploaded to either BSI or ISO, as applicable, at the end of the balloting period. 

As all correctly submitted comments must be reviewed by the standard writers, this system therefore provides you with a mechanism to directly input into the revision process. So, if you are one of those people who are unhappy with the contents of existing standards, you can now use the SCS to do something about it.

Standard currently open for comment:

• ISO 19011 – Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems

The link for the CQI is https://members.quality.org/Standards.

You will then need to select the standard you are interested in commenting on before signing into the Members’ Area of the system.