Meet the Fellow: Steven Moir on his ISO 9001 transition journey

My role is to manage the quality commitment, and facilitate and coach the company to deliver strong teamwork through collaboration.

We’re using the Team Alchemy model to create high performing teams for our transition to ISO 9001:2015. The model combines five crucial elements: team outcomes, trust and respect, dialogue, direction and accountability. Each of the elements is bound together by collaboration with stakeholders.

I don’t have a ‘typical working day’ – one moment I could be working on sustainability, the next on risk management or business continuity. When I’m not busy with this, I’m developing my knowledge on team dynamics to help make sure we manage teams for the 21st century.

“We are proud that DigiPlex was one of the first Datacentre Operators to transition to ISO 9001:2015 in Scandinavia”

I transitioned to ISO 9001:2015 because it is an opportunity to use this transition as a business tool to drive value, improve our operations and reduce the risks. We are proud that DigiPlex was one of the first Datacentre Operators to transition to ISO 9001:2015 in Scandinavia.

The new standard is the foundation for our management system which supports ISO 27001:2013, the information security standard; ISO 14001:2004, the environmental management standard; and OSHAS 18001, the occupational health and safety standard, which we achieved across all our sites in September 2016.

The biggest challenge has been implementing the three other standards across our sites in Norway and Sweden while at the same time integrating the management system.

“You need new skills to transition to ISO 9001:2015 successfully. It is important to understand the context of the organisation and commercially driven risk-based thinking”

We work in Norway, Sweden and Britain so we had to align our different cultures and the approaches we took for deploying the changes to the way we deliver quality.  

Our leadership team is extremely engaged and committed – this helped us to overcome these challenges. We achieved this engagement through team collaboration with process owners and other stakeholders.

The company’s cultural collaboration values are extremely powerful and compelled everyone to help design, implement and follow processes – everyone wanted to be involved and engaged.

“After taking CQI and IRCA Certified Transition Training I was able to confidently introduce stakeholder management into our organisation”

You need new skills to transition to ISO 9001:2015 successfully. It is important to understand the context of the organisation and commercially driven risk-based thinking, then you need to incorporate this thinking into process and audit schedules.

As a Chartered Fellow of the CQI I know that CQI and IRCA Certified Training is the best in the world. It helps with professional development through the Competency Framework and it supports my continuous professional development (CPD).

CQI and IRCA Certified Transition Training helped me to share knowledge about understanding the context of the organisation and stakeholder mapping effectively with other quality professionals and the instructors. After the course I was able to confidently introduce stakeholder management into our organisation.

My top piece of advice for transitioning to ISO 9001:2015 is to prepare a project plan and engage the leaders to support the change. The leaders have to be involved actively in the transition from the beginning – without this engagement, the transition will never work and you will be unsuccessful. Getting a good team to work with you is vital and they have to commit time to participate.