Evaluating a Program

Releasing a program is not the end of the story — once its audits have run their course, the program itself should be reviewed to identify improvements for the next planning cycle. This reflects the guidance in ISO 19011, which recommends monitoring the audit program (5.6) and reviewing and improving it (5.7), not just planning and releasing it once. The clause numbers are the same in the 2018 and 2026 editions.

Prerequisites

Use the Evaluate (Bewerten) action on a Released program to record this review. Before you can evaluate a program:

• It must be in status Released
• Every audit linked to the program must itself have reached a final status (Findings Published or Cancelled) — if any audit is still in progress, the action is rejected with a message telling you how many audits are still open

Evaluating a Program

1. First, fill in the Evaluation field with your retrospective notes — for example whether the program’s goals were met, what deviated from the plan, and lessons learned for the next program
2. Choose Evaluate (Bewerten)
3. The program moves to status Evaluated, and the system records who performed the evaluation and when (Evaluated By / Evaluated At) — this is a traceable stamp, not something you set yourself

Like Risks and Resources, the Evaluation field is free text with example prompts as placeholder text — it is not a formal, structured scorecard.

Evaluate is restricted to the Audit Manager role, for the same independence reasons as Submit and Release — see Program Lifecycle.