ISO 9001:2008 success!

Never in doubt... after Kim's hard work and preparation the success of yesterday's ISO9001:2008 review here at Start Software was surely a foregone conclusion!  I wish... our latest assessor is quite tough and knows the software market well and so his reviews and assessments are a genuine challenge to us.

Yesterday he looked at:

• our staff training regime and what it means to our customers
  did you know that all of our staff are asbestos trained as well as being software experts?
  
• how we decide which software tools to use to build asbestos surveying software such as Tracker and Alpha Tracker with as well as our bespoke software developments using Alpha Five
  we look for long-term partnerships with our tool providers including Alpha Software (US) and CreativityCorp (Australia) - these long term partnerships give us best access to their developers and mean that we can influence the products "from the inside"
  
• our innovative process for developing new software
  we showed him web based database systems (such as online order and survey tracking systems) built from start to finish in days not months using video as a means to gather requirements and communicate with our customers
  
• our help desk process and support call systems and statistics
  he could not believe that we allowed you - our customers - to set the severity and urgency of the call... he said that this was unique in his experience! I am committed to this principle - in my opinion only you know how important a particular issue is and so you need the ability to determine our time-scales for resolving your issue.

After a long day of reviewing, checking evidence, assessing compliance against the ISO9001:2008 standard and generally asking difficult questions he left with only one minor non-conformance found.

Thanks again Kim for your hard work and thanks and congratulations to the team here at Start Software who work so hard day in and day out to meet the needs of our valued customers.