How do you find your Internal Auditors?

I guess I am Bill. My experience has been to keep them as far away from everyday ops as possible. I'm not saying you can't do it your way, it's just what I've seen here. Middle management is very involved, I have a standing open door policy with the President and a seat on the Steering Committee. Just a different - Oh someone already called it!

(that line should give me BINGO! ).

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The last 2 Sundays my Mom-n-Law has spent the whole day in a Bingo Hall!!! It has been beautiful here on both Sundays and there she sits inside. She was complaining about it being too cold to go out a few weeks ago and now she stays indoors and goes to the tanning booth. Go Figure!?!?!?!?!

My experience has been to keep them as far away from everyday ops as possible

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Randy

My experience has been exactly the same, especially in larger organizations (we are "small to mid-sized"). As I mentioned a few posts ago, I am mildly surprised at how well the "Execs" are performing. Just the other day one of the VPs mentioned that he never realized how much he could muck up something like a PPAP submission by "working it out himself with the customer". He just didn't realize that it's the grunts (like me and the customer SQAs) who then have to straighten everything out so it's properly submitted.

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Know what you mean about your Mother-in-Law. Even though we live in the midwest, some people just are never happy (last month everyone was bitchin' about the "cold". Now that it has warmed up, the complaints are for the clouds and rain - pretty nice here today though - hope all them twisters and stuff stay south of us).

Gotta head out to the course for the first nite of league pretty quickly. Have a good one

Bill

OTHER

I find the busiest people are the best auditors....they have talent and insight, and are DOers........and typically meet the most "good traits" for an auditor. They also are the ones that will recieve an audit report and act on it once they see the value in the exercise (i.e. by doing it) Also a good pool is the nay sayers...or the ones that you have the most trouble getting support from...it tends to turn them around.

Selecting Internal Auditors

When I first arrived at my position the previous QSMs had to go knocking on doors begging for auditors to support the internal audit program. Within a couple of months, I convinced Mgmt and the Business Leaders that all groups had to contribute resources to the internal audit program. Once I got their buy-in, I documented those responsibilities into our internal audit program procedure. Here's what we do: For each of the three business teams, they each have to contribute one process engineer and one manufacturing group leader. The can try to opt out of the requirement by providing an above average manufacturing technician or operator, but such a substitution has to be approved by the QSM (me). Then for the indirect, functional teams, for which we have about 6, our procedure states that we have to have 2 auditors from indirect areas, and those groups have to provide an auditor on the average once every 3 years. That makes a total audit team of 8.

One thing to note is that we rotate our auditing team once a year.

The keys were getting everyone's buy-in and then proceduralizing it, so that when it came time to get new auditors, all I do is send out a memo about a month ahead of time stating, "Per our Internal Audit procedure, you owe me......." Well, not exactly like that, but you get my drift. And they can't buck it! The final key was running a good, value-added internal audit so that the managers and leaders felt good about contributing resources to the effort.

Good luck!

tschones said:

One thing to note is that we rotate our auditing team once a year.

The keys were getting everyone's buy-in and then proceduralizing it, so that when it came time to get new auditors, all I do is send out a memo about a month ahead of time stating, "Per our Internal Audit procedure, you owe me......." Well, not exactly like that, but you get my drift. And they can't buck it! The final key was running a good, value-added internal audit so that the managers and leaders felt good about contributing resources to the effort.

Good luck!

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Are you saying each auditor audits for one year only, or a certain percentage of the auditors are replaced each year?

Some of my auditors think they should only audit for one year...why did they sign up, I wonder? We stated in the sign up process that an auditor would be expected to audit for at least three years, and we would attempt to rotate people out after that as new auditors become available. I have explained to the ones who think they shouldn't have to audit for more than a year that it was too expensive to send them to lead auditor training and then only have them perform a couple of audits. They are welcome to go to their department manager and ask to be removed from the audit team, if they really don't want to audit.

And then, there are those who jump in any time there is a shortage and do so with a smile. I love those.

From a lot of the examples I have seen in the past many companies seem to use a box of Slug-Bait to attract their auditors

This thread and the new posts to the radio frequency thread kinda brought two threads together... it is getting close to the end of the year and we have some audits to catch up on due to two of our auditors being out on medical leave...time to get out the shock buttons for the implanted shock devices to bring some of the auditors back into auditing mode.

As the one training our internal auditors at my facility I use the Personal Attributes section of 19011 as a guide. Also our training is performance based which means that we work with our students until he or she masters the subject matter and can demonstrate its application during either a mock or real audit.

Here is also a big time item. Two external auditors recently have also audited my qualification to teach the internal audit course to our personnel. In my case I am certified as a MSDT, CQA, CQT and ISO 9001/AS9100/SSQA Lead Auditor so it was not a problem but look for this to become an even bigger issue in the future. If you contract out your auditor training you will need to have on file the course instructors qualifications.

No we don’t press gang (Method used to recruit soldiers and sailors into the British armed forces in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In effect it was a form of kidnapping carried out by the services or their agents, often with the aid of armed men. This was similar to the practice of ‘shanghaiing’ sailors for duty in the merchant marine, especially in the Far East.)
We shortlist (a more milder form of press ganging and shanghaiing) personnel for the internal auditors’ post and send them to an approved training provider. :truce:

Jeff Frost said:

Two external auditors recently have also audited my qualification to teach the internal audit course to our personnel. In my case I am certified as a MSDT, CQA, CQT and ISO 9001/AS9100/SSQA Lead Auditor so it was not a problem but look for this to become an even bigger issue in the future. If you contract out your auditor training you will need to have on file the course instructors qualifications.

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I'm curious to know if anyone else forsees this to be a concern during External Audits in the future. Personally, I do not. Afterall, ISO 19011 is a "guideline" only and ISO 9001 pretty much leaves it up to us to determine what the qualifications are for our Internal Auditors.

I have attended Lead Auditor training and have been auditing since I first started with ISO 9K over 10 years ago....but the acronyms after my name are pretty much non-existent. I have, however, standardized the training for our Internal Auditors - they all receive the same presentation, the same information, based on what I, as the Management Representative, deem to be sufficient.

To date, our External Auditors have not had a problem with this...in fact, they like the fact that training is standardized and formalized.