Plan, implement and maintain a compliance audit program.
You will first need to establish a team responsible for planning, implementing and monitoring your audit management and compliance management program overall. This team will perform a risk assessment, take any corrective action to mitigate risks and implement a management process for monitoring and maintaining compliance.

Define the criteria and scope of your ISO audit.
Your organization is not only responsible for creating and maintaining a compliance program, it must also understand the scope of any ISO audit for which you’re preparing to assure that all requirements have been met. Ignoring audit requirements can result in costly re-certifications.

Conduct an internal audit first to assure all requirements have been met.
To assure that you can be confident about the results of a formal audit, it’s a good idea to conduct an internal audit before that formal one. An internal audit will allow you to gather valuable data around your ISO compliance and indicate any areas that still require remediation.
Furthermore, your organization should conduct routine internal audits to achieve continuous improvement over time.

Take corrective action for any vulnerabilities uncovered during auditing.
Whether that corrective action is a system that requires calibration, sensitive document controls that need to be implemented or business processes that must be adapted to incorporate stronger security controls — it’s important to remediate all potential indicators that your organization may not pass certification.

Document all risk management, controls and remediation efforts.
Compliance certifications depend heavily on documentation of management systems and the controls that are implemented within them. Therefore, any steps you take to assess vulnerabilities, facilitate risk management, or implement security and quality standards should be documented and saved for your compliance audit.