How to take the free readiness self assessment

MSCi — Management System Compliance Incorporation — publishes a free readiness checklist for each standard we consult on. This is how to use it. It takes about fifteen minutes, costs nothing, and nothing is shared with anybody until you ask for your result.

1. Choose your standard

Open Free self assessment in the menu. There is a checklist for each of the standards we work on — ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 22000, ISO 13485, ISO 42001 and the rest, including the data protection checklists — and you can type the name into the search box to find it. Where a standard has two editions in play, both are listed; pick the one you are being asked to meet.

If the standard you need is not there, there is an enquiry form on the same page for exactly that.

Starting from a standard page instead

Every standard and industry page carries the assessment beside the demo button. Starting from there opens that standard's checklist directly.

2. Describe your organisation

Before the questions, you are asked what your organisation does. This is required, and it is not a formality — the recommendations that come back are read against it. Two or three sentences about what you make or provide, and for whom, is enough. A website address is optional.

3. Answer the questions

Each question has four possible answers:

• Yes — it is in place and you could show it
• Maybe or partly — some of it exists, or it happens without being consistent
• Not sure — you genuinely do not know
• No — it is not there

Answer as things actually are today, not as you intend them to be. An optimistic score is worse than useless, because it produces a proposal for work you do not need and omits the work you do.

Under each question is a note saying what an auditor usually asks to see. Use it — it is often the fastest way to decide between Yes and Maybe.

Questions you skip

You can leave questions unanswered. Anything left blank is counted as No, which is usually the right assumption. Before your result is calculated you are shown exactly which numbers are blank and can jump back to any of them, or carry on and accept the No.

The assured discount

Answer at least 80 per cent of a checklist and the assured discount applies to whatever work you subsequently give us. The threshold exists because a checklist answered in fragments does not tell us enough to price against.

4. Say where the result should go

You are asked for your company, name, email, phone with its dial code, industry, the countries you operate in, the number of sites, and where you are. The last four decide what the answers actually mean: the same score means different things for one site and for eleven.

5. Confirm your email

A six-digit code is sent to the address you gave, good for fifteen minutes. Enter it and your result appears. The code exists so the report reaches you and nobody else, and so that a typo does not send your organisation's position to a stranger.

6. What arrives

On screen, immediately: your score out of 100, the band it falls in, what that band means, what to ask us for, and the heaviest gaps ranked. By email, at the same time: all of it, plus every question with the answer you gave and what it was worth — the first time the marks are shown at all.

Keep the email. It is the document to bring to a first conversation, whether that conversation is with us or with somebody else.

What it is not

It is not an audit, and it is not a prediction of one. Recommendations follow from the answers you gave; the actual position has to be established by a gap assessment carried out by an expert, against evidence rather than recollection.

About the author

Prem Kumar Dvivedi is an auditor with more than forty years in this industry. He has spent that time on both sides of the table — building management systems and auditing them — across quality, environment, health and safety, food safety and information security.