RADA is now ISO 9001:2015 certified

The Rural Agricultural Development Agency (RADA), a statutory body under the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, has been challenged to maintain the rigorous standards in the quality of goods and service delivery achieved by its parish offices in St Thomas and St Elizabeth, which were the pilots in its quest for ISO 9001:2015 certification.

The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) has developed some 25,000 global standards covering several fields, including the production of goods and services of the highest quality, to meet the requirements of end users. It applies to all organisations – governments, businesses, non-governmental organisations, churches, political parties, etc, and RADA’s quest for certification started in 2017.

At Tuesday’s ISO 9001:2015 recognition ceremony held at RADA’s head office, Hope Gardens, ISO standards ambassador in the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce, Reginald Budhan, advised RADA executives that, having achieved ISO certification, maintaining the standard would require a herculean effort.

“It is a serious business when an agency gets ISO certified. It’s a different business, is a different class of organisation, because they are now held to some international principles and the rigour and monitoring that they will go through is far greater than what the Cabinet Office, PIOJ (Planning Institute of Jamaica) and Ministry will do,” Budhan declared at the function.

The flip side to that, however, is that the achievement makes the management process much easier, because every member of staff knows exactly what they need to do, with strategic objectives carefully established, according to the ISO ambassador.

“They can’t say they going to do this and they don’t do it. So your plans now will have to be realistic,” Budhan explained. “Operational plans will have to be properly aligned to strategic objectives, so you can’t at the one high level say you going to do this and then do something different. It nuh go like that, is serious business.”

Among the goals established under the parameters of the ISO certification process is greater accountability for targets set, since the certification agency (National Certification Body of Jamaica) will probe the reason(s) for missing the targets. Also included are greater levels of transparency and documentation regarding how things are done in the organisation.

“Operating procedures are not personality dependent now but systems based. So, whoever come there have to do it this way until the multitude say ‘change it to a better system’. Standard operating procedures will no longer be documents prepared and put on the shelf. This change in culture reduces unnecessary red tape, people become more customer- and service-oriented, reduces wastes and inefficiencies and improves systems of document control,” Budhan added.

Meanwhile, RADA’s CEO Winston Simpson noted that the extensive and exhaustive systems the agency had to employ to achieve the ISO certification were now well entrenched and reflected in its improved internal management system, less wastage of resources, improved productivity, improvement in customer acquisition and retention, improvement in reporting and communication, and an improvement in the quality of products and services.

“It is through this great initiative that we were able to get the top reviews done by the Office of the Prime Minister, on external customer satisfaction for the years 2021 and 2022, scoring over 86 per cent of the design metrics for government agencies,” he said.