On the road to ever-greater professionalism, one accreditation at a time, It is widely accepted that one of the main barriers to the growth of the commercial drone sector is trust – both among the general public and within the business community. I’ve always thought that the best way to secure that vital trust is to drive greater levels of professionalism within the sector and each and every one of us has to do our bit to create the industry we all want.
From the day we opened our doors at Iprosurv, that has always been our primary focus and it always will be, regardless of what this sector does or where it goes. But professionalism is, of course, somewhat subjective and can even be difficult to define.
For us, it is of course the way we and our pilots conduct ourselves in every job and in every situation. But it’s also about adopting internal best practices to ensure you deliver not just the product, but that every process to achieve this is done with commitment and quality to demonstrate to the public and business that we can be trusted.
Qualifications and accreditations allow you to evidence all of that which is why we have sought out further flight exemptions from the Civil Aviation Authority, are accredited by the Information Commissioner’s Office and are Cyber Essentials accredited as well as members of ARPAS, but to name but a few.
All of these have played a huge part in our success to date and today we are delighted to announce that we can add ISO 9001:2015 to that list.
All of these have played a huge part in our success to date and today we are delighted to announce that we can add ISO 9001:2015 to that list.
I know, it’s not the most attention-grabbing title but what it stands for, what it recognises, certainly should be. What this accreditation means is that Iprosurv meets an internationally recognised standard for Quality Management Systems incorporating Privacy and Surveillance functionality for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). Which in turn means that we have been independently recognised as providing a service that meets or exceeds customer and regulatory requirements.
This takes into account a range of principles from leadership and planning to operations and performance evaluation and crucially, accreditation demands a commitment to continual improvement of management standards.
It’s not something you can just pick up off a shelf – it takes time, effort and lots of patience to get to this stage but from personal experience, it has been worth every minute of effort that it took.
Of course, it’s nice to have the approach we take to business recognised in this way but more important than that, I think it shows prospective clients and (hopefully) the wider public that we are serious about what we do.
If you are a drone operator and haven’t yet secured the accreditation, I wholeheartedly recommend that you do. It will act as a real differentiator and the more of us that are willing to put in the effort to show we are serious about building a robust, safe and compliant commercial drone sector, the sooner we will get the trust we all need.
And after that, the sky is the limit for drones.
* I couldn’t resist the pun! I’m not sorry either …
