Individual and Departmental Responsibilities

[Ingeniero1]

I hope I don’t overextend my welcome here with all my inquiries, but the closer the date of the real audit gets, the more I keep identifying potential deficiencies in the work I have done and am doing.

Here’s another one that more than likely will not have a single right answer, and again I wonder how some of you approach the issue.

I am responsible for preparing the company for ISO 9001:2000 certification, and I report directly to the president. There also is a Quality Control Manager, who reports to the president as well. Even though I work closely with QC, I do not report or have anything to do with them organizational-wise. My two functions here as a full-time independent contractor are Management Representative, as for ISO 9001:2000, and manufacturing and process engineer.

Even though I wrote all the procedures after interviewing the managers and personnel involved in each area, it was a clear-cut decision when it came to assign a department or function to be responsible for each procedure. The same holds true for most forms; someone (the author) created them and may change them as needed, but a department, which may not be related to the author, uses them (turns them into ‘records’) and keeps these records.

My concern is that there are some procedures and forms that I have authored on my own; e.g., Control of Documents, Internal Audits, audit Checklists, and several others, over which I am laboring in assigning departmental responsibility. Since these procedures, forms, and records (activities in general) did not exist before, there is no department responsible for them. Also, since I am the individual responsible for their implementation and maintenance, and I do not belong to a department, they are in limbo.

In our case, who would you say and what department or function should be responsible for Control or Documents, Control of Records, Internal Audits, Audit Checklists, Management Responsibility (audit result reviews and so on), Master Documents list, Master Records list, and similar?

Thanks!

Alex