Approach
Assessed from both sides of the table.
The reason this work is worth buying is not that I know the standard. It is that I know what an assessment finds, and why.
More than twenty years in metrology, beginning in the U.S. Navy nuclear power programme as an electronics technician and qualified reactor operator, shutdown reactor operator and reactor technician, four of those years aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
After the Navy, nuclear instrumentation at the Surry Power Station in Virginia, and from 2000 onward pharmaceutical calibration and measurement quality — first as a process instrument technician, then in a primary calibration laboratory, as the metrologist responsible for pressure and vacuum measurement systems from 2006, as an engineer from 2008, and in a quality assurance role from 2021.
Since 2018, assessing calibration and testing laboratories to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 as a qualified assessor for A2LA, a lead assessor from the following year, and a member of its Accreditation Council since 2019. Since 2026, a qualified lead assessor for NIST’s National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program.
The useful part is not the list. It is having sat on both sides — having written the budget that someone else later questioned, and having been the person questioning it.
How I work
Four things I hold to.
Findings are written to be acted on
A finding that does not say what evidence would close it is not finished. Everything I write names the clause, the evidence I looked at, and what would satisfy it — in the order I would deal with them.
Traceable to evidence, not to a specification
A manufacturer’s figure is a starting point, not a source. Where a laboratory holds its own calibration history, that history is almost always the better and often the smaller contribution.
Proportion matters more than completeness
A contribution worth two per cent of the combined uncertainty does not deserve the same argument as one worth forty. I will tell you when something is not worth changing.
Impartiality is a boundary, not a slogan
There is work I will decline: anything where an existing assessment relationship would make it inappropriate, and anything that would put me in the position of reviewing my own recommendations.
Tell me what you are up against.
A short description of the measurement, the scope, or the finding is enough to start.