The designated Internal Auditors at the Internal Audit Opening Meeting	Chancellor Murao delivers an inspirational message for the auditors

UP Mindanao units opened up their records for the ISO Internal Audit on August 28-30, 2024. The university personnel who trained as internal auditors assembled on August 28 for the Internal Audit Opening Meeting at Gaisano Room before deployment. 

According to the ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System Manual, "the organization shall conduct internal audits at planned intervals to provide information whether the system conforms and is effectively implemented and maintained."

“The audit is not about you. It's about improving the university's processes,” said ISO consultant Perfecto “Jun” Cagaanan Jr.  

“You mentioned UP's quality policy, let's be guided by that,” he said. “We are here to produce graduates who are learners to become leaders and we are here because we believe in honor, excellence, and public service.”

Chancellor Lyre Anni Murao congratulated the internal auditors for having reached the halfway point in UP Mindanao's ISO journey.  

"The experience of the journey that we are facing right now, I have a word for it. We are doing a 'shawshank,'" said Chancellor Murao. She referenced the word to a movie portraying a prisoner's escape after the tedious effort of digging a tunnel.

"This may take years years of undoing old practices and old mindsets until we make our way into a new kind of UP Mindanao. One that experiences a community that is enabling, empowering, and facilitative. So we are shawshank-ing," she said.

"I received feedback that ISO is here to correct our problems. I'd like to correct that ISO will not solve our problem. We will solve our problems. We are the ones who will do the required corrections," she said.

"What ISO is doing is changing our mindset, our perspective, into having a customer-related mindset. So, the moment that we adopt these principles it becomes part of our daily life. In time, you will become problem-solvers, and therefore we will be able to address all, if not most, of the concerns in the university. So, we're not just going to sit here to wait for ISO to do things for us. We are ones who will do these things for the university," she said.

"This will take years of work. It will not change us today, or tomorrow, but in the next few years, that we will reap the benefits of ISO to our university. We are headed in that direction. The good news is that we have started the journey," she said.