ISO 9000

The first version is developed by International Organization for Standardization (International Organization for Standardization is ISO) in 1987. A current series of standards was published in December, 2008 (ISO 9001:2008). ISO standards 9000 represent general requirements of how the Quality management system of the enterprise/organization giving a quality assurance of products or the rendered services should be constructed. The quality management system can be applied to all aspects of management: to marketing, storage, sale of products, etc., but first of all to a production process or provision of services. ISO standards 9000 are accepted as national more than in 140 countries of the world.

What is ISO 9000 not enough?

Comment of the blogger of kochnev_a_f

From time to time heads of the enterprises, ISO-certified 9000 address us, with a request to implement them SMK (quality management system). They already have a certificate, and now there is a wish that all this also worked. And here what thoughts with respect thereto arise...

Why implementation of ISO 9000 turned into total hack-work? In my opinion, this system lacks no implementation technique which would be almost implementable. It is clear that for implementation of the process focused approach to company management it is not enough to write a pile of documentation on business processes and to provide formal training of employees. Something else is necessary... So what is not enough?

There is not enough, in my opinion, understanding that process of changes cannot be intermittent. Often SMK is implemented against the background of the disordered activity, i.e. absence into the companies of any regulated processes. In other words, the start state of processes of the company is qualified by the "zero" level of a maturity. But from zero level it is impossible to jump on the fifth at once!

Here explanations are necessary. Having taken the known model of a maturity of processes of creation of the software of SMM (Capability Maturity Model) as a basis, we developed own scale of a maturity which can be applied to any processes.

And so, using this model it is possible to estimate the current level of process control and to define conditions of transition to the following level. This approach allows to carry out evolutionary changes of processes, increasing their level of a maturity step by step.

Also following circumstance is not less important. Processes do not exist separately. They form chains. The maturity of a chain of processes is not higher than a maturity of the lagging most behind process. From this we receive the important investigation: "Improvement of the process which is not "a weak link" does not give return on investments made in its improvement". Thus, the model of a maturity of processes allows to optimize the efforts directed to improvement of a management system and to receive the maximum return on investment into organizational development.