Articles and Presentations Library
An Effective Management Review?
This short story illustrates why an environmental auditor should always be able to identify issues that may appear to be very obvious once they have been revealed. The recent success of the series ‘The Apprentice’ is perhaps due in part at least to the straight-talking direct style of Sir Alan Sugar, who provides some excellent assessments of the performances of the young hopeful participants.
Likewise, auditors should be able to ask some direct and essentially simple questions such as “Is the management review effective in addressing issues raised?”. An interview with representatives of the management team should then provide the answers, providing the style and phrasing of the questions is suitably less combative than Sir Alan’s.
In this example, a large office-based company had held an ISO 14001 certificate for a number of years. Things were becoming routine on the environmental front as the only real issue of interest was the minimisation of waste and electrical energy consumption by an agreed percentage that had not changed for at least 2 years.
The audit revealed that top management conducted an integrated business systems management review, the whole presentation took up about 25 powerpoint slides packed with information on customer satisfaction, business performance indicators and related information. Action points were well covered.
The section at the end addressed environmental issues and graphical comparisons of energy use illustrated a somewhat variable performance. The summary slide sought to indicate that performance was on track. However, closer scrutiny revealed that actually the energy total for the year was 10% higher than the agreed target. This went unnoticed and at the end of the environmental presentation there was no action point or summary requiring this to be addressed. The target for the following year was again set for a 5% reduction but without recognition that the most recent objective and target had effectively failed to deliver the goods!
The auditor must be able to see this clearly and to reveal the problem so future management reviews can be carried out more effectively. It was noted that several quality-related issues were clearly linked to improvement actions together with personal responsibilities set within the management team. There is no reason why environmental issues should not be addressed in a similar manner to quality-related issues especially when the organisation has gone to great lengths to integrate their management systems.
John Marsden (FIEMA)
info@marsden-international.com
John is an independent management system auditor who works for a number of international certification bodies.
