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Inspections versus Audits
Why are we looking at Inspections versus Audits? Because you will come across both inspections and audits in your project management career, and during the PMP exam, so it is important to know their differences and their similarities and when and where they are used.
First of all let’s look at inspections. An inspection is the examination of a work product. So someone is actually inspecting it physically, a particular work product or an item that we’re delivering. We’re determining if it conforms to the documented standards. This could be a quality check for example, where we ask “Does it meet meet the feature set that we agreed upon?” when we’re delivering our project.
The results of a single activity can be inspected, or the final product itself can be inspected. Inspections might be called reviews, peer reviews, audits or walkthroughs (especially in an Agile sense). You might have a walkthrough or even a peer review or demonstration or review to your product owner or to the customer that you’re delivering to. Inspections are also used to verify defect repairs if we’re fixing something in our project. We will need to inspect that once it’s fixed and make sure that it is ok and we’re happy to proceed.
Now this differs from audits, where an audit is a structured independent process used to determine if project activities comply with organizational and project policies, processes and procedures.
This is more of a high-level view – someone is coming in, usually from the outside (external to the project) such as the organization’s internal audit department, or a project management office or an auditor external to the organization itself. They’re coming in and having a look and asking “Is our project being documented in the right way, is it following the the methods that we want them to follow, is it delivering the project in the way that we want it to be delivered, does it meet those policies, procedures and those requirements?” Does it have a system in place for delivering all of those things?
All of that will be looked at as part of an audit within your project. Some audit objectives may include (but they’re not limited to) identifying all the good and best practices being implemented – so maybe they could recommend some best practices for your project. Maybe we could follow the PMBOK guide for example as one of the best practices in the industry to deliver your project. We’re identifying all nonconformity or gaps or shortcomings, so maybe there are gaps in the way that we’re delivering, maybe there are gaps in the product that we are delivering, and all those can be called out by one of those auditors coming in and looking at the way our project is been delivered.
And that is the difference between inspections and audits.
– David McLachlan