Performance art? Or just stupid rules?

Image by Bernd Hildebrandt from Pixabay

A couple of days ago—well, it will be more by the time this post is published—Chris Paris wrote a post arguing that certification audits have become a kind of "performance art." He illustrated his point with a schedule one of his clients had gotten from their certification body, and walked his readers through it to show just how much padding and non-value-adding time it contained. 

I have to wonder, though: Was this artifact really a confession that the whole audit process is just a stylized drama empty of meaning? Was it—as Paris suggests—"essentially B2B theft" [emphasis in the original] because the client was paying for a full audit without getting one? Or was the auditor just responding in the best way he could to a set of inflexible rules set by the certification body concerning audit duration?

Of course there have to be rules about audit duration, and at some level they have to be inflexible. Otherwise every single client will argue "But we're a special case," and there will be no consistency from one audit to the next. The risk of purely subjective results would be even greater than it is today.

But it is simply not possible to write meaningful rules that cover every contingency. Any system of rules will always paint with a broad brush, and so there will always be cases that don't fit. Paris's client is clearly one of them: while the rules calculated that a certain number of hours were mandatory, Paris's own description of his client's business makes it obvious that spending the mandatory number of hours in meaningful audit would have been far, far too much.

To be clear, I don't know the details about Paris's client or their CB. Maybe in this case everything Paris says against the CB is justified. But it's not always so.

For example, I've seen something similar in my own experience. I once worked for a Business Unit that created a special location for its worldwide headquarters, half an hour's drive from an already-established regional headquarters. There must have been reasons, but those reasons were never clear to most of us. Sitting in this "worldwide headquarters" was a small software team who just happened to be in the same place anyway, and then the heads of all the global departments. But their respective staffs were distributed around the world in the company's regular offices. This one location had the Global BU President, all the global BU Vice-Presidents, a couple of administrative assistants, and (as I mentioned) a small software team who had no particular connection with anyone else there.

When it came time to schedule our audits, our CB told us this site required three full audit days. I asked why, and they showed me the calculation: because we were in this line of work, we had to use that table; because the overall organization was this size, we had to use that row in the table; then there was a factor because this site did office work (production would have involved a different factor); and finally there was a factor because this site was the Global Headquarters. Grand total: 3.0 audit-days. End of discussion.

I hope it's obvious from my description of who was actually located in this site that there was no way we could stretch the audit to three days. I worked with the auditor directly, and between us we came up with a schedule that the CB approved. But in reality he and I spent a lot of time sitting in the conference room alone, just talking. And we allocated a lot of time for lunch. It was a waste of time and money, but trying to enforce three full days of genuine auditing would have been far more wasteful.

I think the following year I told the CB we had "moved" the headquarters to the big office half an hour away. There was lots going on in that office, and we never ran short of functions to audit.

In principle, the best answer would be for the rules that determine audit-days to account for all possible variations, so that we don't run into the kind of foolishness that Paris and I have both described. But I don't think we can ever do that. The real word will always be more complex and full of variety than any set of rules we can devise. So long as that's the case, it's hard for me to get too exercised when the principals have to adapt the rules to fit reality. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld reminds us, after all, that "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue"; and sometimes a small homage can smooth over difficulties more easily than a full corrective action.