December 2021
The LCA in the past issued service delivery standard checklists to assist LCA members in how they audit themselves for service delivery. This year the service delivery standards have been revised but the checklists have not been reissued. A number of members have questioned why we have not provided the ‘exam questions’ and have only provided the ‘syllabus’.
Fundamentally, LCA members must understand the service delivery standard detail and how they comply with this in their operation. In past years we were aware of numerous members who had never looked at the actual service delivery standard, they had only looked at the checklist.
The new service delivery standards all have numbered paragraphs and a common format to enable them to be directly used to audit against. As in previous years there remains, however, some overlap and crossover between the Code of Conduct and the various standards and this may continue to lead to some repetition of work on internal auditing.
Section A of each standard is about the scope of the standard and does not need to be audited beyond ensuring that if you deliver the service, you register the service.
Sections B, C and D are auditable and for each numbered clause there is likely to be something that needs to be done to comply with that requirement. The basic internal audit example template we have provided can be used to check each of the clauses and report if your company does not comply with the clause, make the necessary changes to comply and close out the internal audit action.
Your procedure should comply with every clause if you deliver the service. The evidence you examine to demonstrate that you follow your procedures may result in some of the clauses of the standard being non-applicable in the particular job you are auditing, in which case you should record the reasons why it was not applicable.
LCA members may have noticed that we have moved to a spreadsheet-based audit report document that has more functionality than the previous word document. Our intention is to add the service standard audit elements to this spreadsheet over the coming months and to cross link the questions to streamline the process and to minimise duplication.