The Importance of an ISO 20000 Audit Checklist

Implementing ISO 20000 certification can be an arduous journey that takes both time and effort. Furthermore, organizations must adopt and adhere to this standard in order to become ISO certified.

Establishing an ISO 20000 project is a fundamental element of certification. This process includes creating a project board, selecting a project manager and staff, ascertaining necessary resources, and outlining an implementation plan.

Documentation
An ISO 20000 audit requires documentation that adheres to the standard, such as documents, procedures, templates and records. Furthermore, auditors will want to see information on incident handling and resolution times.

Documenting can be challenging, but tools exist that can make this easier. Global Manager Group provides a Documentation Toolkit ISO 20000 which contains ready-made documents which can be tailored specifically to fit the needs of any company, helping reduce errors and increase accuracy.

In order to be ISO 20000 certified, management teams must communicate the reason why their organization wishes to become ISO certified, endorse the project, provide support, ensure staff have enough resources for this endeavor, and can focus on it without daily responsibilities taking precedence. It is also vital that activities are planned out accordingly with milestones and work tasks scheduled into an annual plan.

Procedures
Implementing an ISO 20000-based service management system requires adhering to certain procedures in order to meet standards and enhance quality service provision, as well as ease the certification process. Utilizing a checklist is one effective way of making sure all necessary steps have been completed.

A checklist will enable you to identify gaps between the requirements of a standard and your current situation, whether through self-assessment or external consultant assistance. Once completed, this process should result in a list of nonconforming processes with their reasons for not complying with standards.

List should be presented to an NSF-ISR lead auditor during an on-site gap analysis or upgrade audit, and also included in ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 Audit Report for review. Ultimately, this checklist will give a more accurate depiction of your ISMS’ current state as well as help save time by decreasing documentation requirements prior to an upgrade audit.

Training
If you want to become ISO 20000 certified formally, an RCB (Registered Certification Body) must evaluate your IT Service Management System against its requirements in accordance with ISO 20000 standard and issue a certificate of compliance. The timescale for doing this depends upon both the size and complexity of your organization as well as whether this certification process starts from scratch or has already established an adequate foundation.

An effective way to prepare for an audit is with a checklist. A checklist will enable you to keep track of the physical evidence required for your ITSMS and give you confidence that you will pass. Furthermore, using one could potentially help minimize nonconformances that emerge during an audit.

Download an ISO 20000 audit checklist xls from the internet. This template features procedures, plans, records, documents and audits that you can quickly customize to meet the needs of your organization – making this an effective way of shortening preparation time for certification audits.

Monitoring
Organizations looking to remain compliant with ISO 20000 must conduct regular internal audits, while also making sure processes adhere to its requirements. An audit checklist must also be created; this document allows employees to quickly identify any gaps in processes and procedures while serving as preparation for certification audits by external auditors.

Implementing various best practices when developing an audit checklist can make for an effective one, including keeping it concise, providing clear instructions, incorporating lessons learned, training users and seeking feedback. Furthermore, updates must be regularly made in order to reflect any current processes, regulations or requirements that arise.

Establishing an effective audit checklist can help organizations strengthen internal audits and achieve greater compliance with ISO 20000 standards, but many find creating it on their own challenging. Luckily, ready-made ISO 20000 audit templates are readily available online that can save companies both time and money – these documents can even be edited by multiple users simultaneously and work seamlessly across versions of Excel.