Musings on Internal Quality Audits: Having a Greater Impact

For over 20 years, Duke Okes has spoken and published articles on internal auditing, and trained an estimated 2,000 internal quality auditors. This insightful book is intended for those who understand the basics and are looking for ideas for how to improve what their organization gets out of the internal quality audit process. It is broken into three parts. Section 1 is a summary of the basic quality audit and intentionally does not include things such as training of auditors, basic auditor competencies, and so on. However, it does look at some of the more recent changes in the audit process driven by changes in standards, technology, and globalism. Section 2 includes several concepts and methods that organizations can choose to use if they want to make their quality audits more robust from a standpoint of achieving the intended purpose. Section 3 then intentionally pushes back from the standard perspective of auditing as a technical process for control and looks at softer issues that an audit program might leverage. It also tries to project a bit into the future as to how the audit role/process might change. Appendices include example audit situations to spur discussion, a SIPOC form for audit planning, and examples of quality risk management audit questions.