3rd January 2007, 02:17 PM
It is easy to overestimate the powers of any QA system, and therefore to conclude that the RAO system doesn't work.
I work for a company that is not only an RAO, but also has a QA system certified by LRQA, an Environmental Management system certified to ISO 14001, and is certified as an Investor In People. All of these are essentially QA systems certified by third parties. I have regularly participated in external audits for all of these, including being inspected recently by the IFA.
No QA system or other 3rd-party certification scheme assures the technical quality of any organisation's work.
What they do is certify that the organisation has robust management procedures in place that meet the requirements of the scheme. The audit process (e.g. IFA inspections of an RAO) is meant to make them provide evidence that they not only have those procedures, but that they apply them to their work on a day-to-day basis.
So, for instance, if the procedure says that you will ensure that all of your sub-contractors are required to comply with IFA standards, they will review a sample of your Specs to ensure that this requirement is in there. They may also look at your monitoring procedures and records.
Having good procedures and applying them does improve the quality of your management and also makes it easier to trace back anything that goes wrong to its origin - but it does not ensure good technical quality. It is still down to internal checks and checks by the client to make sure that the technical quality is good.
These comments apply to all 3rd-party certification schemes, not just the IFA RAO scheme.
Having said that, some (not all) of the other schemes are more rigorous than the RAO system. On the other hand, they are also much more expensive to set up, operate and audit. I suspect, for example, that my company spends more each year on its QA scheme than the total income of many archaeological organisations. If the RAO scheme became that rigorous, I suspect it would quickly fold, because few if any organisations would be willing to spend that much.
Overall, companies are willing to spend the money on these schemes mainly because these certifications are frequently used by clients as pre-qualification criteria when they are compiling tender lists. So, no certification, no invitation to tender. If a requirement for RAO registration became normal practice for archaeological contracts, then every organisation that wanted to stay in business would have be registered, and the cost could easily be passed on to clients. Loss of registration (even for one year) would then be a really serious sanction, and the system would have much more teeth.
1man1desk
to let, fully furnished
I work for a company that is not only an RAO, but also has a QA system certified by LRQA, an Environmental Management system certified to ISO 14001, and is certified as an Investor In People. All of these are essentially QA systems certified by third parties. I have regularly participated in external audits for all of these, including being inspected recently by the IFA.
No QA system or other 3rd-party certification scheme assures the technical quality of any organisation's work.
What they do is certify that the organisation has robust management procedures in place that meet the requirements of the scheme. The audit process (e.g. IFA inspections of an RAO) is meant to make them provide evidence that they not only have those procedures, but that they apply them to their work on a day-to-day basis.
So, for instance, if the procedure says that you will ensure that all of your sub-contractors are required to comply with IFA standards, they will review a sample of your Specs to ensure that this requirement is in there. They may also look at your monitoring procedures and records.
Having good procedures and applying them does improve the quality of your management and also makes it easier to trace back anything that goes wrong to its origin - but it does not ensure good technical quality. It is still down to internal checks and checks by the client to make sure that the technical quality is good.
These comments apply to all 3rd-party certification schemes, not just the IFA RAO scheme.
Having said that, some (not all) of the other schemes are more rigorous than the RAO system. On the other hand, they are also much more expensive to set up, operate and audit. I suspect, for example, that my company spends more each year on its QA scheme than the total income of many archaeological organisations. If the RAO scheme became that rigorous, I suspect it would quickly fold, because few if any organisations would be willing to spend that much.
Overall, companies are willing to spend the money on these schemes mainly because these certifications are frequently used by clients as pre-qualification criteria when they are compiling tender lists. So, no certification, no invitation to tender. If a requirement for RAO registration became normal practice for archaeological contracts, then every organisation that wanted to stay in business would have be registered, and the cost could easily be passed on to clients. Loss of registration (even for one year) would then be a really serious sanction, and the system would have much more teeth.
1man1desk
to let, fully furnished