I can now – very proudly – announce that we caught them!

The process of getting to this point has been a pretty intense one, especially for those of us that are on our Quality Team – Shay and Drew as our Security Officers, Gill and Barb as our Quality Managers, and Andrew and myself as the ‘Risk Owners’. Other staff also played a role in getting us here and in the last few months we’ve been steadily rolling out a whole range of improvements to our procedures and working practices.

We realised this morning that, with new appointments coming on board recently (and introductions are coming shortly), that we almost number 30 staff – the biggest that Gaia Resources has ever been. And this is one of the reasons that the Quality and Information Security Management Systems are so important. As I mentioned in that previous blog, it’s important that we enshrine our standards in procedures and processes that enable us to continue to deliver high quality solutions to our clients.

One of my favourite parts of the ISO Quality System is the ‘Opportunity for Improvement’ (OFI) component, that empowers anyone within our organisation – or even our clients – to suggest ways in which we can improve our procedures and systems. This was an initiative we’d already taken at our strategy workshop earlier in the year, but formalising the procedure really does add some more weight to it. We have a lot of OFIs already being implemented as a result of our audits and certification process, with more to come.

And so, to reiterate what I said in the previous blog, if there’s some way that you think we can improve what we’re doing (i.e. an OFI!), we’d love to hear from you. Please drop me a line directly at piers@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

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This came to a crunch in the last few weeks when we had a couple of quality issues about systems we developed emerge.  While I’m really proud of how the team came together to fix these issues, and how they worked with our clients to resolve them, I’m still gutted that they happened in the first place.  However, timing is everything, and I do certainly believe that a failure is a chance to make an improvement – and there’s some really great ideas out of those couple of failures that we’ll be posting about in due course.  At the same time, over the last few months we’ve been working very hard on a range of things behind the scenes to improve the company, starting from our recent strategy day (see here).

The largest thing we’ve been doing is to move towards getting accredited by the International Organisation for Standards (ISO) against two standards – ISO 9001 which is all about Quality, and ISO 27001 which is all about information security.  The second of these we have been pushed towards very strongly with our work in the Archives sector, but the ISO 9001 accreditation is something that I see as a way of enshrining my OCD into the corporate way of being even more strongly than just through our culture.

As part of this accreditation, we’ve developed two policies – a Quality Policy and an Information Security and Management System Policy, which we are also making available on our web site through these links, so that they’re up front and centre for all our clients – and even on the walls in our office for our staff (see right).

While we won’t always get everything 100% correct, we will keep working to improve the systems that we develop under both the Quality and Information Security areas.  This is something that I’m very keen on – not just as a small business owner, but just as another obsessive person trying to make the world just a little bit better.

So if there’s some way that you think we can improve what we’re doing, we’d love to hear from you.  Please drop me a line directly via piers@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

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