If you’re involved in auditing or providing certification services for ISO conformity assessment, you’ll be interested to know that there’s a new addition to the ISO/IEC 17021 series. The new release is ISO/IEC TS 17021-6, “Conformity assessment — Requirements for bodies providing audit and certification of management systems — Part 6: Competence requirements for auditing and certification of business continuity management systems.” It compliments the ISO/IEC 17021 and will be used for ISO 22301 certification.
ISO 22301, “Societal security – Business continuity management systems – Requirements,” provides you with the requirements to set up a BCMS (Business Continuity Management System). Basically, it’s a way to implement controls and measures to manage your organization’s capacity to manage disruptive incidents. In today’s business environment, with challenges coming from all sides, the use of BCMS to manage this type of risk can be critical.
Of course, as with any of the ISO management system standards, verification that the organization is meeting the requirements of the ISO standard is essential. It’s part of the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) model that is fundamental to the management system scheme. And confirming that the person or organization doing the verification is competent is critical to success.
That’s where the ISO/IEC 17021 series comes in. Each part of the series gives you the requirements needed for assessing compliance with a specific certification scheme. So those of you working on ISO 22301 certification or providing certification to this standard will be pleased that the Part 6 has now been released.
ISO/IEC 17021-6 gives you the basics of what you should expect in the individuals who providing auditing and certification services in Sections 4, 5 and 6. You’ll then get a table in Annex A that summarizes this information, a “Table of Knowledge” that takes the specific area of expertise needed and links it to the various clauses in this Technical Specification. The 6-item bibliography finishes off the document.
Now you’ll need to get your copies of these standards. Use Document Center Inc., an authorized dealer of both ISO and IEC publications. These publications are available for order on our website, www.document-center.com. You’ll have the option of requesting either paper format or pdf download. Want multi-user access? As our staff about our Standards Online subscription service. You can reach them by phone (650-591-7600), fax (650-591-7617) or email (info@document-center.com). Remember, we’re your Standards Experts!
