A Guide to Auditing Top Management as well as the Internal Audit Checklist

Organizations must audit the processes linked to top management included in an effective internal audit program. These processes include those relating to strategic planning, the establishment of policies and objectives, ensuring effective communication and ensuring the availability of resources.

Auditing management or directors is usually seen as an sensitive issue but by considering each management activity as being a normal organizational process, it might be better to give attention to determining whether the outputs with their activities work well.

The best way to Audit Top Management

With a formal risk-based approach to internal audit planning, as needed by ISO 9001, auditors have a great possiblity to engage top management from the audit process. By making management area of the planning process and also by providing them with ownership with the areas to get audited, the inner audit gets a valuable mechanism for development.

A good kick off point would be to copy, in the audit checklist, all requirements from your standard that say 'top management shall', nearly every clause of section 5 begins with 'top management shall' and the auditors job to find if management 'did'. The audit checklist must take care of certain requirements from the following sections:

5.1 Management Commitment

5.2 Customer Focus

5.3 Quality Policy

5.4.1 Quality Objectives

5.4.2 Quality Management System Planning

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 undertaking the internal audit of top management, the auditor should collect and corroborate proof of top management's commitment from the inside the high quality management system itself. The auditor should ask the way the quality manual addresses management commitment issues and have how they are accomplished; then, the auditor should have objective evidence that proves it's actually being done. This technique refers to management plus the production machinist, everyone else from the organization as an example!

When the standard, documented procedures, policies and objectives are audit inputs, then this evidence sampled as well as the interview statements produced by top management auditees would be the audit outputs. If your input will not align with the expected output, the auditor simply states this misalignment being a non-conformance whilst providing an audit trail to the supporting evidence.

Final Reporting

Auditors quality manual template should prepare the interior audit report in a manner suitable for presentation. It may be essential to present the executive breakdown of the audit report straight to the superior management as well as other your clients inside the organization. The manager summary must highlight both bad and the good findings and suggest opportunities for improvement.