ISO 9001 at Kenn Scaddan Associates Limited

In December 2006 I received an enquiry from Kenn Scaddan Associates Limited, Portsmouth, for consultancy assistance to achieve registration to ISO 9001.

Kenn Scaddan Associates Limited are an architectural practice, trading for nearly 25 years and had 9 employees at the time of the project (comprising 4 qualified architects, 1 currently qualifying and 4 support & administration staff). The customer base is mainly local housing associations where the practice has earned an exceptional reputation over many years.

Kenn Scaddan, the founder and driving force of the business was of the opinion, quite rightly, that an effective quality management system would be of major benefit to the organisation.

The requirement was to implement a quality management system and have it assessed and registered to ISO 9001 by SGS (this certification body had already been recommended to them).

I had a meeting with Kenn Scaddan in January 2007 and he advised me that there could be reluctance from some of his staff. Furthermore, I learned that the practice had tried, on more than one occasion, to implement ISO 9001 in the past but the consultants engaged had proposed extremely cumbersome systems and the projects were abandoned.

Kenn asked me if I would be prepared to give a presentation to all staff to convince them of the benefits of ISO 9001. His comment was that if I could convince the staff that it was worth doing then I would be given the consultancy contract.

This presentation was held in February resulting in the staff willing to give it a go - I was therefore engaged.

The project started in March 2007 and it was agreed that completion in six to nine months would be realistic and achievable.

My main contact was the Practice Manager Terry Maidment.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) provide a QMS template to their members and this was reviewed during the early stages of the project but it was deemed to be a very complex, bureaucratic approach and it was soon agreed that very little of the content would actually be used. Some records were made use of but the textural procedures were discarded in favour of one-page process flowcharts.

I managed the complete project, taking a total of 10 days of my time and significant milestones are as follows:

June  Flowcharts finalised
September Quality Manual published
October  SGS document review (off-site)
October  Initial full-system internal audit
October  Management Review
November On-site assessment by SGS resulted in registration being recommended. One minor nonconformity was observed.

My services are being retained to assist with the internal audit, management review and external assessment processes.