Performing Management Reviews In Accordance to ISO 9001

A management review is nothing but a structural scheduled meeting that involves all stakeholders, including the top leadership team to peers and relevant department heads.

Specific organizations schedule management reviews at certain frequencies depending on the criticality of the factors involved.

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Are Management Reviews Another Boring Office Meetings?

No, But they can be a waste of time if not conducted rightly! Management reviews are carried on in different organization to verify the working direction, effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, to listen to concerns of your team, to design strategies for upcoming challenges and most importantly to get in touch with your team.

Making Management Reviews productive or annoying is purely your choice! You can only make it a part of the critical requirement of achieving strategic business results.

Top Ten Objectives of Management Reviews

Various objectives are meant to get accomplished by having a management review at your organization. Among which enlisted are few significant ones here:

  1. To remain focus on business direction, its targets, and goals.
  2. To address changes that have occurred in your organization.
  3. To take advantage of improvement areas by highlighting them.
  4. To boost employees morale.
  5. To address potential risky areas of the business.
  6. To gauge actual results being achieved concerning the performance curve.
  7. To make your team learn from past mistakes and how not to repeat them.
  8. To address the trends of recurring problems.
  9. To avail an opportunity to look at a business from various angles.
  10. To evaluate systems under ISO 9001 compliance.

 ISO 9001 Guidelines from Clause 9.3 about Management Reviews

One of the mandatory requirements of ISO 9001 that the organizational system must be reviewed by the top management leaders of the organization.

General Requirement

Management reviews must be carried out periodically to review QMS and to ensure the compliance, effectiveness of QMS, and alignment with organizational strategic direction. It is up to the management when to have management reviews, but it has to be conducted once in a year.

Purpose of Management Reviews

  1. Evaluation and Determination of QMS
  2. Evaluate any need to amend or improve QMS
  3. Determination of the suitability of the policies and objectives of QMS

Agenda of Management Reviews According to ISO 9001 Guidelines

To conduct useful management review, the following information should be collected and compiled well before the time of management review, which means the following information must be collected before you start the management review meeting.

Management review input should include

  1. Risk and Opportunities (Clause 6.1)
  2. Amendments that might have the potential to affect the system (Clause 6.3)
  3. External Vendor/Supplier performance (Clause 8.4)
  4. Customer Satisfaction level (Clause 9.1.2)
  5. Results of Audit (Clause 9.2)
  6. Any non-conformity or corrective actions to be taken (Clause 10.2)

Expected Outcomes of an Effective Management Review

 It is an audit requirement to get the Management Review done in the form of documentation, conclusion, highlighted improvement areas, and any corrective actions being mutually decided within the team in the presence of all stakeholders.

Being the leadership responsibilities totally crystal clear, the context should be linked to the context of the organization and the scope of the services. The most visible outcomes of an effective Management Review can be:

  1. Process Improvement Opportunities being Highlighted
  2. Improvement Actions related to QMS
  3. Improvement Actions related to Product
  4. Any Amendments Being Mutually decided to Quality Objectives and Policies
  5. Management Review Minutes of Meeting

Documented Procedure for Management Review Record

In ISO 9001, a detailed procedure is being defined as to how to document the management review minutes of the meeting. Your documented minutes of a meeting of Management Review must contain the following elements:

  1. Management Review Responsibilities
  2. Management Review Scheduling
  3. Management Review inputs
  4. Management Review outputs

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Management Review?

If you want to judge how good or bad your organization had conducted management review, then look for the following checklist if the below tasks have been done:

  1. Key Decisions
  2. Positive Work Progress
  3. Employees feel more motivated to accomplish new targets
  4. Previous tasks being completed
  5. Forecasts related to next production plans
  6. Estimates related to budget
  7. Any revisions being done on planning resources
  8. Any support being asked by your team members and peers

 Follow-Ups After Management Review

Designate any member of your team to make and circulate minutes of meetings along with action plans (tasks) with the name of the person responsible for performing that task within mutually agreed timelines.

It is crucial to make and circulate the minutes of the meeting of Management Review so that they can be discussed in the next Management Review whenever it is scheduled to be conducted. Meanwhile, department heads must ensure the completion of all the tasks to be done before following management review and provide support, mentor, and guide their teams whenever needed but before the deadline of the task.

By the passage of time, your team will become habitual of facilitating management reviews effectively and efficiently. Before next management review, the management leader should be able to determine what needs to be done, what resources will be required to accomplish the tasks, Who to held responsible for which duties, what timelines are involved in achieving those tasks and how the results will be evaluated for tasks accomplishment.

The perfect outcome will result in accomplishing all the tasks on real terms, ultimately delivering real-time progress. One of the best practices is to hold one management review at a time, for example, carrying out management review on monthly, quarterly, or six monthly bases.

Conducting too many management reviews can harm your business objectives. Just suppose for few minutes that you are sitting in a Management Review at the year-end, and you are looking at all targets being on Red side and upon investigating you found that too many days to day Management Reviews didn’t let your team focus on individual problems.

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