What's so great about PEARs?

Back in March* I took an online class from Christopher Paris on "Process-Based Internal Auditing." Paris is always an interesting guy, so I was sure he would have some new insights or approaches I hadn't run across before. And sure enough, he absolutely did. I won't list them all here — for that you should send him a note and ask him to give the class again — but I wanted to mention one template he described that can be used for a quick overall status summary for any high-level business process.

Photo by Steven Giacomelli and posted on Pixabay. 

In any management system audit, we always look at business processes. And we have to evaluate them from two directions. 

• On the one hand, is the process implemented? In other words, are people on the floor actually doing whatever the documents say they are supposed to do?
• On the other hand, is the process effective? In other words, is the process itself accomplishing whatever the system says it is supposed to accomplish?

Both points are critical. If nobody is following the process, then your process documentation is just waste paper and you might not even know what's really going on during the day. And if the process isn't achieving its goals, the business itself is going to suffer: you picked those goals because they mattered to you, and now you are failing to hit them. If your business is to survive, your management system has to be effective as well as compliant; and that's why management system auditors have to look for both.

At the end of the audit you report your findings to Senior Management, and right away you face the problem of explaining the critical information you have uncovered while not losing them in all the details. In order to make improvements they have to see the whole forest, and not get lost in all those trees. And this is where this template comes in.

It's called a Process Effectiveness Assessment Report, or PEAR. The one Paris showed us in the class is his work, but it is based closely on the official PEAR form from the AS9101 report template. As he remarked, "Mine is just tweaked for internal use." Paris provides this form as part of an Internal Audit Report template that he makes available for free on his website: you can download the single report template from this page here, or get the entire template kit as a single ZIP file here.

In essence, the PEAR form is a simple 3x3 matrix.

So for each high-level process, ...

• Vertically, you measure process implementation, which means you look at your list of findings. Are there Majors? Are there Minors? Or do you just have a handful of Opportunities for Improvement? Based on this list, you can easily decide whether the actual working practice matches the written process documentation, partially matches it, or does not match it.
• Horizontally, you measure process effectiveness, which means you look at the current process metrics. Are they green? Are they red, but with corrective actions planned and under way? Or are they red and ignored? Based on this information, you can easily choose which column of the matrix applies to this process.
• Once you've got your row and your column identified, mark an X in the right cell, copy the corresponding score into the space at the bottom, and you're done!

Of course this matrix doesn't take the place of a full report. What it does is to tell Senior Management at a glance where their risks are. And it relies entirely on information you have already collected during the course of the audit. In principle it doesn't add any new information to what you are already reporting. But I like the visual presentation, and the way it derives so easily from the audit data.          

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* Has it been so long already? Time flies when you're having fun.