Yehey! The Local Government of General Santos City has been ISO certified!

After the initial jubilation of possible employee incentives during the year-end, you might wonder if getting the certification has any significant meaning beyond your work life.

As a government institution that continuously strives to improve its public service, getting certified is a never-ending process. You have a process. You learn. You become efficient. You improve over time. Rinse and repeat. On and on it goes.

Does ISO certification have any significance in your personal life? Yes it does. If you’re smart. If you’re not and you don’t care, then it’s only you who will not improve.

So what are the useful lessons that we can learn from the certification process? Many things. The concepts will be explained below, starting with:

1. Make risk assessments and make contingency plans for these risks

Risk assessment is also essential in any activity. Risk is always present to some degree in one way or another. You identify potential steps or process that are more likely to be delayed or more likely to fail and plan contingencies around it.

Think about the undertakings you plan to do. Undertakings that span several weeks or months, and those that requires considerable planning and execution. Examples of these may be constructing a house, or going on a family trip to somewhere.

During house construction for example. The schedule may be delayed. You may run out of materials or funds. The carpenter may construct something different from what you had in mind. These unforeseen risks are somehow there.

Take the family trip as another example. You may get delayed during travel. Flights may be canceled due to sudden bad weather. You may experience sudden illnesses such as stomach ache for eating food from restaurants along the way. Or your vehicle may break down and you may get stuck in an unfamiliar location. You may also get lost along the way.

Considering the safety conditions around your home, is your house safe from fires? Floods? Communicable diseases such as dengue mosquitoes, or unsafe potable water?

From here you can devise mitigating measures. What will you do in case of fire or flood? What preventive measures can you come up with that can be implemented in a certain time frame, starting with the short-term, middle term, and long-term?

Think about the unexpected possible scenarios that may arise from the normal course of events and plan what to do about these when they happen.

2. Document your best practices and improve on them

Everyone has a certain way of doing things. Daily procedural work such as cooking meals, cleaning and organizing the house, doing the laundry, disposing off the trash, etc. While you already have established certain habits and a regular schedule to do these tasks, it is beneficial to learn better workflows and more efficient ways of doing them.

With daily meals, for example, you may have a set of recipes and meals that you prepare on a regular basis. Perhaps you can learn more new recipes that will add more variety to your palate. Or learn to make your existing meals more palatable and more nutritious.

ISO process optimization is all about making your procedures lean and efficient. The techniques employed in the process is also applicable to home organizing. Thus, when it comes to home organizing, you can adapt the ISO methodology, as well as learn from tutorials online on how to declutter your home and how to ensure that everything is in its place and is easily accessible and readily available when you need it.

3. Do SWOT Analysis of yourself

SWOT stands for (S)trength, (W)eakness, (O)pportunities, & (T)hreats. Learn what you do best, then find occasions where you can work at your best. Discern your weakness. Not only should you identify your weaknesses but plan out how to remedy or overcome your weaknesses. After identifying your strengths, you may look for opportunities that can play to your strengths. Finally, learn to identify threats. These threats may endanger your financial standing, your career, or your health. Think about how these threats may come, and plan accordingly on how to mitigate these when the threats happen.

4. Identify key inputs and outputs of your process

This may apply to your financial goals and well-being. Identify the inputs that determine how wealth flows into your finances. Perhaps you can try to find more opportunities to make money so that you have plenty of revenue streams to depend on.

Equally important is to identify the outputs of your finances, your expenses. These are the outputs that are difficult to control, but you must have the determination to control these no matter what. Controlling expenses is tough, but you have to do it.

5. Make the household work replicable to your family members

If you have family members that are cooperative and dependable, then you are truly blessed. Structure the household work in your home and ensure that other family members can do it in case someone is absent, away on a trip, or is sick. Delegate the work and rotate them to everyone so that everybody can participate and contribute.