To prepare for Quality certification, e.g. ISO 9001:2026

ISO 9001 is the well-recognised international quality standard that specifies the fundamenal requirements for a Quality Management System. Any organisation may rely on it even if not seeking certification, to confirm and increase its ability to consistently and continuously provide products and services that best meet customer and regulatory requirements, as well as the organisation’s own technical and operational requirements. If your response to some of following key questions is not a clear “YES “, you may need us!

• Is your management system still aligned with your vision, context, strategy, values, roadmaps, and quality objectives?
• What is the status of former audits actions?
• Is your management system effectively communicated to the right audience at the right time? More importantly, is it designed to be relevant and engaging, ensuring strong staff involvement on agreed quality objectives and customer expectations?
• How committed are executives, senior, line managers, and staff to ensuring quality?
• More specifically, how well is your management system prepared for an upcoming ISO 9001 certification, particularly regarding the new 2026 version, which includes some rewording and brand new requirements (e.g. climate change, social responsibility, ethics, management culture)?

Even when ISO 9001 certified, companies may not yet reach optimal performance and agility within their management system. Certification only ensures that the management system meets a set of basic requirements but does not really assess the effectiveness of the underlying processes and support tools. An objective, independent evaluation by an external expert, actively searching potential inefficiencies, can deliver additional and valuable insights into your specific critical areas, addressing questions such as:

• Are your working methods, processes, and guidelines not only clearly documented, up-to-date, consistently structured but also really lean?
• Are all procedural and control steps still relevant, and why? Could some become superfluous?
• Are your support tools nicely integrated, i.e. effectively automating procedural steps and control checks without any duplication or gap?
• Are roles and responsibilities clearly defined (e.g. as RASCI tables), well understood, with no overlap, and mutually agreed upon within your teams? Are they aligned with your latest strategy, including the functions within your organisation to effectively prevent friction or conflict?
• Does your risk and opportunity management deliver measurable value? Do you evaluate scenarios using probabilities before yes-or-no decisions?
• Is your decision-making process effective: always relevant, executed at the right time, at the most appropriate level of responsibility and accountability?
• More generally, how is your management system currently perceived within your company, and why? Does everyone recognise its added value?

To smoothen your organisational changes

The human factor is crucial, yet communication challenges can arise and must be addressed promptly—or ideally anticipated—when implementing changes or managing significant transitions within specific environments. This is especially important when dealing with somehow abstract concepts such as quality-related ones. Examples include potentially uncertain answers to the following questions:

• Are your transition and communication plans complete, clear, understood, and agreed upon by all relevant stakeholders?
• Have you ever faced the following problems: misunderstandings, disagreements or even conflicts between individuals or teams? A spirit of competition rather than emulation? Conscious or unconscious resistance, or vague fears due to change? Difficulty seeing the big picture and the fundamental meaning of the mission to be accomplished, of the actions to be carried out, of the choices to be made? Being stuck in old habits or limiting beliefs?
• Which facilitation tool (e.g., individual coaching, mediation) would be most appropriate for you?