Andy Hills Independent Business Consultant

Assurance

A simple term where the fundamental meaning, with regards to business, has been lost. Assurance is nothing more than a level of confidence that you are doing the right thing in the right way in a consistent manner and that you can prove it. It can apply to any aspect of an organisation or project. Although often mentioned in tandem with things such as Quality, Safety and Competence, it actually has more to do with the mechanics of defining and running your organisation; your overall approach. There has never been the need to split assurance into separate functions although this frequently occurs within larger organisations.

So how do you gain a level of confidence? How do you show and prove you are assured?

Simple - you integrate it into every part of the business and make it a way of life. It is an essential facet of a well integrated organisation or project, requiring dedication, empowerment of staff and accountability. By planning and reviewing and putting the pieces together, you get a complete picture and can easily see where you need to focus.

I said simple before - that was a bit of a misnomer. The essence is simple but the practice of ensuring all the pieces fit together requires a lot of effort. In fact, if you were to plot the graph of effort required, you would probably find it a bell curve - steep and hard before peaking and becomming easier over time. The efforts required should be loaded to a project at conception for the easiest path. Yes, when you first start to plot and plan; after that and effort required to retrospectively install assurance parameters increase hugely. Focus should be made on making assurance practices routine in all areas.

Applied & managed standards

Standards must be applied throughout an organisation. By that I mean both professional, such as ISO standards or the Yellow Book, and personal, as in how you conduct yourself and being diligent in your work.

However you choose to put assurance into practice, it always comes down to one activity loop - Define - Plan - Do - Check - Act (some will notice this is my adaptation of the ISO PDCA loop). This is true of all successful businesses - they define their business or activity or standard to be applied, plan how it should be done and resources available, do it and check it is correct. In this way errors are picked up and mitigated and plans are controlled.

The assurance comes from being able to prove you have defined the job and accounted for all contractual obligations (defined and implied); you have planned how to do it, who will do it and to what standard of work; you have records of checking the work and what was found; and that you have acted upon these results.

This is true regardless of size - as applied to an organisation, a department, project or activity.