Most educational organizations or institutions had been aiming to go for the ISO certifications.
ISO 9000 is a proven quality management system which has been successfully adopted by a number of education and training institutions.
Within education and training, the aim of the quality management system is to ensure that the provision of service is both consistent and continually improving.
All aspects of staffing, training and induction, management and most important the teaching and learning should be part of the quality system.
A great deal of controversy exists pertaining to the benefits of ISO 9000 Quality Management Systems deployment within organizations worldwide.
Based on a study by StudyMalaysia.com (February 26, 2015), these are the Educational Institution Awarded The ISO 9000 Registration; Universiti ITM, Shah Alam (Examination Centre Only), Universiti Utara Malaysia (Library Only), Universiti Teknology Malaysia, Skudai (Library Only) and Universiti Sains Malaysia, Pulau Pinang (Registrar Office Only), Sekolah Rendah Seri Indera, Perlis, Sekolah Menengah Derma, Perlis and Politeknik Shah Alam, Selangor.
Meeting ISO 9000 requirements doesn’t mean your organization has completed a total quality management process. But preparing your company for ISO 9000 is a good start on the road to total quality.
Meeting the ISO 9000 requirements is good but to maintain its stature is another thing. It’s like to win the World Cup in games, to be a champion is a great achievement but to be a consistent champion is a factor to be considered.
In a recent internal-auditing that I went through (I had been through for more than 10 years actually), the Director (who is also the Head of the ISO team) was very alarmed in knowing that there are a list of ‘selected and readily’ auditees that were mentioned.
Auditing is actually like doing a study or research whereby data come from ‘sampling’. We do not choose ‘picked or chosen’ data to be analyzed. Likewise, auditee should not be ‘people’ they want to ‘victimized’. And the Head of Departments should be audited too.
Auditing should be done with full responsibilities, open-heart, and of course with full integrity.
In the ethics of auditing, every member of the institution must be ready with their files and documents for auditing. Members were normally to be ready with 2 main files; The Auditee Profile Files and the Auditee Work Files.
A check list for each files were provided to ensure that auditees know what to be ready with and to ensure auditees are ready for pre-auditing and post-auditing, all files must be endorsed by the respective Head of Departments meaning all the document files are ready for the real auditing.
Another alarming factor is the ‘Auditing Committee Team’ is more of looking for faults, rectifying and creating unnecessary additional comment.
There seems to be no ‘standardization’ in the auditing process and procedures. Each auditor seems to have their one way of understanding and thinking of their own.
ISO should be ‘do what you write and write what you do’. We don’t create things out of nothings.
The auditors involved must be ‘nice, cool and kind’ as the idea is to help and improve ‘client’ performance. Auditors should assist ‘client’ to have all documents to be audited readily for checking.
Auditee involved must also know their priority and giving full cooperation in completing and readily present themselves when called for.
The auditing process may take 2-3 days to complete, should the auditee has their ‘classes’ to attend then to classes they will go. There must be mutual understanding between the auditors and the auditee.
Should the ‘organization’ does not meet the requirement for the specification after trying all these years, what do you think really happened? Why the members of the institution failed to deliver in making things happened? Something must be wrong somewhere.
The auditing committee team must surely had post-mortem done after each session. Maybe the auditing committee is not ‘ISO’ed.