Should You Hire A Consultant For Iso, Or Do-it-yourself?

By Author: Andy Brown
Total Articles: 9
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Should you hire an ISO consultant to help with IMS implementation, or go it alone? What are the pros and cons? How can you get best value for money if you hire a consultant for ISO and what are the criteria you should use for choosing ISO consulting?


Having worked as IMS consultants in the Middle East since the past 15 years; Infovision has come of age as world class consultants for ISO providing ISO consulting services.  We’ve had a rigorous ISO consulting experience.  However, you might well ask yourself whether you can trust a consultant for ISO to tell you about how to select and utilize consulting services!


It has been our experience that typically consultants for ISO have a tendency to withhold information about the selection process for ISO Consulting companies. We, at Infovision Consultants WLL, make it a point to educate the clients about the ISO 10019 published standard which enshrines the guidelines for prequalifying consultants for ISO and the ethical measures that ...
... ought to be considered while selecting ISO consulting services. We would like to strongly recommend you to ask the following two fundamental questions before opting for ISO Consulting Services:

• What is the aim of your IMS implementation?

• Do you need to use an external Consultant for ISO, or would it be best to use your in-house resources/consultants?

There are too many organizations opting for ISO consulting services that are not using IMS the way it’s intended. There are a plethora of consultants for ISO and certification bodies in the market who are exploiting this weakness and resorting to unethical means of securing clientele looking for ISO consulting. It is because organizations going for ISO consulting usually want to do it quick and cheap.


You need to get a good understanding of the scope and challenges of the task ahead of you, your strategy for implementation and the availability of in-house consultants for ISO before being able to determine whether you need external ISO Consulting support from professional.

At this stage, some external Consultant for ISO’s input might indicate a fruitful avenue. Alternatively a Consultant for ISO from outside of your organization might be able to provide value for money by supporting or facilitating your process of figuring out how big the job is for ISO consulting!


Therefore, watch out for the consultants for ISO who want to sell you their “one size fits all” manual! Too often, that has led to systems that are not sufficiently relevant or appropriate to the organization undertaking ISO consulting. Creating generic procedures that are lengthy and not related to your business processes by consultants for ISO will only lead to frustration and extra cost of maintenance.


However, common templates provided by consultants for ISO can be useful as a means to provide some direction to organizations undertaking ISO consulting. If an ISO consultant is able to help you link your activities, products and services – this is what the scope of IMS wants you to consider – with the main sustainability risks and opportunities, then your system will take shape as a tool that is able to support management in making the right decisions at the right time.

You could invite three consultants for ISO to give you a 20-minute presentation each for ISO Consulting, focusing on an introduction to ISO standards, success factors for IMS implementation and how the consultants for ISO could help you by adding value through ISO consultancy services.

After the presentations, you should do a brainstorming session about your strategy for implementation, ISO consulting and then determine which roles should be fulfilled by internal consultants for ISO and external ISO consulting. If you are convinced that external ISO consultancy is needed, then provide the consultants for ISO with some terms of reference and ask them to come back with a proposal for ISO consulting.


Avoid auditors that are only interested in documentation or consultants for ISO that insist on documentation as evidence that a system is in place.

• Remain in control of your IMS system and in charge of the implementation project – it must result in your system! And remember that it is you who will be running it once the ISO consultant’s input is finished unless a maintenance service from the consultants for ISO is required.

• Do not measure the success of the implementation – and the consultant for ISO’s input – by the size of the documentation that has been developed, but rather by the involvement and commitment of the organization and the related competency that has been developed during the ISO consulting project.
• Ensure that all of the specific outputs of the project are owned by your organization.