Interested Parties and their Needs

8 min readJun 12, 2020

Introduction

Interested Parties is one of the newer elements within the ISO standards and I think its important to understand what the purpose is for this new element before giving some insight into how you may wish to control and manage this process.

To give some background, the requirement for ISO management systems is now to shift your focus towards risk, you should be building your management systems around the areas of risk and implementing suitable mitigations. Believe it or not, the stakeholders of standards wish for you to remain in business as well as ensuring the quality and service is of the highest level. If your business fails then it will have a ripple effect along the supply chain, this is especially important within the high integrity standards such as AS9100, AS9120, AS9110, IATF 16949 and ISO 13485. Getting new suppliers approved takes a lot of time and effort, new products and suppliers need to go through a new qualification process which can take years in some cases so is avoided.

When they created Annex SL (the foundation for all ISO standards) they included interested parties as one of the key planning elements.

The idea is that you should identify the needs and expectations of those interested parties and ensure you are reviewing the risk around you not meeting those needs. If you don’t meet those needs then you will not only have upset people but this may also have a knock-on effect on losing business.

So who are your Interested Parties?

Your interested parties are those groups of people or organisations who have an interest in your business in some way or another. They can be seen as Stakeholders but without the financial tie in. It is hard to give a defined list as they will vary depending on the organisation and its business but there are some general ones that would be in most businesses such as:

Teammates/Colleagues
Customers
Suppliers
shareholders

There is no requirement in ISO 9001 to document these parties but there is in the Aerospace Standards (AS9100 etc), personally I think you should document who these are for reasons you will see below. It will primarily provide an understanding and focus within the business, if you do not document them it is too easy to forget.

There is no need to split these interested parties down any further into sub-categories, but in my opinion, you should in certain cases as the needs may be different. I will explain more later on why I think this.

Interested Parties Needs

Once you have identified the interested parties you then need to identify their needs and expectations. What do they mean by this?

If you don’t identify the needs of that party you are basically just going through the motions without any consideration for those influencers on the business. It’s like going into a shop and asking for a product but being sold a different product that doesn’t meet the initial requirements.

Some Typical Examples:

Teammates: Job security, to feel part of a team, flexible working
Customers: products delivered on time, to specification, good quality
Suppliers: clear purchase orders, paid on time, good working relationship
Shareholders: to be able to sleep at night

Teammates/Employees Needs

I don’t like the word employees as that implies they work for you, if you are a leader you should work for the employees, not the other way around. Technically an employee is someone who is employed for wages or a salary which is correct but I prefer to think of everyone as a teammate, it creates a synergy and removes the rank.

So what do your teammates need from the business, the obvious answer is money but money is rarely a driver to anyone’s reason for working somewhere. You can get money in other businesses so what is it that would make someone stay working for your organisation?

Everyone has different needs so it is hard to give a definitive answer without asking the person directly. At a high level, they are going to need a friendly environment where they feel part of the team, they will also have some kind of aspirational need which you need to identify and support them on this journey.

Identifying the needs of the individuals, in this case, is the best method

One method you may use is appraisals, you don’t necessarily need to perform appraisals but these are common within businesses and come in various different guises. The tool or method you use is not important, the important thing is the identifying of needs and setting out goals to achieve those.

Customers Needs

This is probably the easiest party to use as an example, the obvious choice is on-time delivery, good quality etc but to truly understand the customer needs you need to look deeper. One of the methods is to ensure you pull out all of the information at the contract stage, do you truly understand everything that customer wants from you? This will be different for each customer but your system should highlight that one of their needs is for you to meet customer contract requirements and then evaluate it on a contract by contract basis.

Personally, I think you need to go even further with understanding your customer needs and consider the relationship needs. What care and attention does the customer need? Do they like to have weekly updates of progress, are they someone who doesn’t want to be bothered, are they someone who just wants emails or prefer phone calls? Each customer and each person is different and a large part of a business is relationships. Building those relationships and creating your tribe.

Supplier Needs

The suppliers are always listed as interested parties but the needs are often defined incorrectly, what organisations tend to do is highlight what they need from the suppliers, not the other way around.

Suppliers should be considered as partners to your business and not suppliers, suppliers to me sounds like a one-way street. For a business to be successful it can’t do it alone, it needs collaboration with other organisations and people.

By either changing the word suppliers to partners or at minimum, remembering that they are partners and you need them just as much as they need you it will change your mindset.

When identifying the needs of your suppliers you need to consider what they need from you, not the other way around. Your needs come from your purchasing process, this clause requirement is aimed at identifying what they need from you in this relationship.

Now you could simply ask the question yourself but to truly treat this as a relationship you should ask the suppliers directly.

The needs could be to receive clear instructions, to receive payment on time and be given work but that’s the obvious answer. Depending on the nature of your business and something I see a lot would be the incorrect lead times being given and fictitious delivery dates such as the same day or next day when in fact you don’t need them for 6 weeks or there is a 12 week lead time.

When giving fictitious lead times you are causing problems at the supplier, they will either ignore the due date as they know it is not realistic or they work crazy fast to achieve something which is normally beyond their capabilities. This could put added pressure on the organisation and possibly involve them to let down other customers by prioritizing your order.

You may not want to ask every supplier individually of their needs but you could possibly put them into categories, your most critical suppliers you could look at asking them individually but others you could do as a collective assumption.

Shareholders Needs

Return on Investment is the number 1 identified need in this category, it’s a bit of a cop-out to identify this as the need and self-explanatory. No one wants to lose money but let’s try harder.

I have been a shareholder and yes you worry about money but my number 1 fear was being sued for something going wrong, maybe the business wasn’t legally compliant, maybe we miss-treated a staff member or customer and that impacted our reputation and brand. These could, in turn, impact my return on investment so if you are going to highlight ROI as the need of the shareholders at least ensure you dive a bit deeper and break down which things may impact the ROI.

This breaking down could be done as part of your risks and opportunities process but I personally prefer to do it here; list out all the possible issues that could impact my ROI.

Document the Needs

As mentioned above, you do not need to document the needs of the interested parties, however, as you start to define what those needs are you might end up with a longer list than you planned and also things which might not necessarily be obvious. By documenting the needs you can keep the needs in your focus and also use these to communicate with your teammates.

The identified needs of the interested parties are needed for your risks and opportunities so even if you are not going to formally document them within your system so I suggest you write them down before moving on.

The Twist

I think that the standard is missing a clause, there is already a clause that is aimed at “Customer Focus” but not for employee focus. You could argue that by identifying the interested parties needs you are addressing the employee needs but I disagree, it doesn’t provide enough focus.

The employees within the business can make or break the success, a true leader looks after the people who look after your customers. With that in mind, you should prioritise the interested parties needs and communicate that within your strategic direction and communications.

In my opinion, the employee needs should be placed higher in the ranking of importance than the customer needs. If you create a culture and an environment where the employee’s needs are considered and they are felt to be more than just an employee they will strive to work for something greater than themselves. They are a part of a larger team and are focused on bigger things than themselves. They will then do their utmost best to protect the organisation which in turn will be to focus on their customer needs.

My concern is that sometimes there is too much focus and emphasis placed on the customer needs and very little effort if at all placed upon the employee’s needs. Employees are key to any organisation and even more important to smaller businesses where they may have a greater impact.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.