Preparation

Scope

Preparing well is crucial for an audit to be successful. You’ll firstly need to select the auditor (ideally someone who has completed an auditing course). This person must be independent of the areas being audited (ie doesn’t work in the area).

You (or the auditor) will then need to confirm and document the scope, which will be based on initial planning. This involves:

• identifying the processes and/or procedures to be audited
• identifying the documents to be used
• identifying the people, equipment, information and materials required, and
• determining the process relationships with other stakeholders.

Note: It’s also important to remember that the scope should include a review of the safety processes and procedures included in the organisation’s safety case and safety system.

The number of activities covered by a documented system is often too large to cover in a single audit, therefore audits often need to be limited to a relatively small sample of an operation. It’s helpful to include processes that address the following areas:

• Routine activities
• Non-routine activities
• Methods of dealing with problems in activities

You can also carry out spot checks on items that have been allegedly been inspected or tested by the auditee.

Documentation review

Only by reviewing the documentation can an auditor decide how to progress the audit and develop the questions they need to ask during the audit.

Documents you should review to understand what needs to be done include:

• Manuals
• Work instructions
• Hazard and risk registers
• Policies (eg drug and alcohol)
• Relevant regulations and/or legislation
• Safety cases

Other supporting documents you should review prior to your visit to understand what has been done include:

• Previous audit reports (including previous assessments undertaken by your organisation and Waka Kotahi Safety Assessments)
• Follow up reports
• Inspection records (eg maintenance schedules and reports, training registers, pre-start checks)
• Failure, accident or defect reports

Performing a desktop review of the documentation prior to the site visit will save a lot of time and effort during the audit. Familiarising yourself with the documents will enable you to ensure they comply.

Questions and checklists

Checklists are one way to ensure that the audit will be performed according to your specified audit objectives.

Note: A checklist is an aid to an internal audit. Internal audits are not a tick box checklist exercise.

Checklist benefits:

• Provide a guide for the auditor
• Provides objective evidence of the task working
• Used to collect notes during the audit

Care should be taken to only include questions that address the purpose and scope of the audit and each question should be based on a documented requirement of the system.

When forming your checklist questions, think about the input to the process being audited, what is carried out within the process and what the output of the process is. Then try to make your questions follow this input-process-output flow.