Two years ago* I wrote about some changes that had been proposed in the ISO 9000:2015 standard, Quality management systems — Fundamentals and vocabulary. Since that time, the responsible committee TC176 decided to move forward with an update, and they have recently posted a Draft International Standard (ISO/DIS 9000) for review and voting. This draft contains numerous changes and updates. And to be clear, the DIS has not been formally approved yet. Something might still change. On the other hand, since the document is now public, the confidentiality rules on committee work no longer apply and we can discuss it publicly.
For those who want to follow along at home:
⇒⇒ YOU CAN BUY A COPY OF ISO/DIS 9000 FROM THIS WEBPAGE HERE. ⇐⇐
What's changing?
Rewriting passages
I tried to keep track of the changes in wording, to see if I could discover a common thread, and finally gave up. In many cases the changes seemed no more than another way to say the same thing; other times they introduced qualifiers which might be helpful but were probably not really essential. In some places the new text backs away from promising that Quality management will bring you success,** but in other places it adds those suggestions where they weren't before.***
The only absolutely consistent change that I detected was that ISO DIS 9000 no longer refers to itself as an International Standard. Time and again the phrase "this International Standard" has been replaced with "this document." Where the Introduction to the current edition promises that "This International Standard … provides the foundation for other QMS standards" [Emphasis mine.] the Draft says more modestly that "This document … provides the foundation for quality management and quality management systems (QMS) standards." In fact there is only one point in the whole document where the Draft retains the words "this International Standard," and I am certain it represents a copy-paste error.****
Does anyone know why? Is there a technical reason that ISO 9000 will no longer count as an "International Standard" after this edition is published? I don't know, but I'd love to understand it better.
New technical terms
The new Draft standard defines a lot of new words. Oddly enough, it also deletes a few old ones.
At the same time, the committee added far more terms than it deleted. I count eighty-six new terms. A few of these relate to traditional Quality topics, which makes their earlier exclusion look like an oversight: complainant, form, good practice, result, work instruction. There are even two new terms related to configuration management (configuration information and configuration item), which makes the loss of the others still more of a puzzle. Then there are terms related to ancillary disciplines like project management (project life cycle, project phase), or to tools that have become popular enough to be considered more or less standard (change matrix, dashboard).
But over half the new terms—forty-five in all—relate to government and voting. These terms aren't used anywhere else in the new Draft, so it's not like they are part of the regular conceptual infrastructure. They seem to come from ISO/TS 54001:2019, Quality management systems: Particular requirements for the application of ISO 9001:2015 for electoral organizations at all levels of government: terms like electoral body, outsourced electoral process, ballot proposal, electoral service development plan, and so on. I assume that the committee wants to pull all the technical vocabulary for all specialized applications of quality management into one large pool where they can be kept consistent with each other, rather than letting them hide in specialized documents where they can be scattered and hard to find. But I wasn't part of the subcommittee which decided this point, so I am only guessing.
New concepts
Then there are the principles and the concepts. Here there has been both rearrangement and addition.
In the first place, whole sections have been rearranged. The 2015 edition broke up clause 2 as follows:
2.1 General
2.2 Fundamental concepts
2.3 Quality management principles
2.4 Developing the QMS using fundamental concepts and principles
The new DIS 9000 swaps the position of concepts and principles, and then splits concepts into "fundamental" and "additional" as follows:
2.1 General
2.2 Quality management principles
2.3 Fundamental quality management concepts
2.4 Additional concepts relevant to quality management
2.5 Developing the QMS using fundamental concepts and principles
Among the concepts, … well, the existing concepts that were carried forward didn't change much, though some were put in clause 2.3 and others in clause 2.4.****** But there were a lot of new concepts added. Some of these "new concepts" are familiar terms that Quality professionals have been using for decades, but which were never before now brought into this standard. Others are … a lot newer. Here's the list of new concepts that have been added:
Quality management
Quality assurance
Quality control
Quality planning
Process management
Risk-based thinking
Organizational quality culture
Continual improvement
Integrated management system
Circular economy
Emerging technologies
Innovation
Change management
Customer experience
Knowledge management
Information management
People aspects
Business continuity
It's quite a list. Each one gets a short essay of a couple paragraphs (the longest is a page), explaining what it is and why it is listed.
Where does this leave us?
I think the committee is trying to do too much. Most of the new Draft is fine, of course. But that list of new concepts is too long. Or rather, it's not the length that troubles me. It's that a few of the concepts—circular economy, for example, or emerging technologies—have only the thinnest connection to Quality.
To be clear, I don't think these concepts are unimportant. And I recognize that the committee is trying to encourage businesses to look past tomorrow, to take account of the issues that lurk in the shadows, waiting for them in the wider world. Emerging technologies affect all of us, like it or not. Innovation has become a fact of life in the marketplace. And the more we can adopt the perspective of a circular economy, the less strain we will put on our resource base, our supply chains, and our natural environment. These topics are all important ones to think about, and the actions stemming from them are valuable things to do.
But they're not about Quality. Quality is about satisfying the needs and expectations of customers and other interested parties. And while it is important to understand the impact that our actions will have on the natural environment or on future generations, it's a stretch to identify either the environment or our successor generations as "interested parties." What's more, I worry that trying to do too much will distract us from focusing on the topic at hand. For this reason, I'm inclined to think that ISO 9000 should stay in its lane.
This is exactly the same argument I made when we discussed whether the Quality standards should address climate change. You may remember that the majority disagreed with me last time, so I won't be surprised if they disagree with me this time too. It happens.
To put the best face on it, I do understand that the committee is trying to nudge businesses and other organizations into considering these important issues. And in a sense, this document is a good place to put these topics, precisely because it is explanatory and not directive. ISO 9000 never tells you what to do; that's ISO 9001's job. ISO 9000 just tells you what things mean, words and concepts. So if you really don't care what circular economy means, you can skip that part and no harm done. No auditor is going to quiz you about it later.
It almost looks as if the committee has decided to make ISO 9000 into an overall Generic Framework for Organizational Management. Maybe that's even a useful thing to do. But it's not what I was expecting from the document title.
__________
* Has it really been that long? Time flies when you're having fun!
** In the 2015 edition, clause 2.3.1.2 begins, "Sustained success is achieved when an organization attracts and retains the confidence of customers and other relevant interested parties." The new Draft deletes this sentence in its entirety. It does retain a later sentence which offers no more than that "Understanding current and future needs of customers and other interested parties contributes to the sustained success of the organization." [My emphasis.] Also, for some reason the new Draft shuffles around the order of the sentences—not just here, but in most of the clauses that were otherwise retained more or less intact.
*** In the 2015 edition, clause 2.1 para. 1 ends, "The impact of quality extends beyond customer satisfaction: it can also have a direct impact on the organization’s reputation." The new Draft adds the words "and sustained success" before the period.
**** Note 2 to definition 3.2.10 ("quality management system consultant") says, "This International Standard provides guidance on how to distinguish a competent quality management system consultant from one who is not." [Emphasis mine.] Now in fact ISO DIS 9000 says nothing at all about the competence of quality management system consultants. But another standard does discuss this subject: ISO 10019:2005, Guidelines for the selection of quality management system consultants and use of their services. What is more, the definition of "quality management system consultant" that we find in the new DIS 9000 appears word-for-word in ISO 10019:2005, along with two notes. The two notes are also repeated word-for-word in the new Draft, and the second of those notes promises to distinguish competent consultants from incompetent ones.
***** The Alphabetical index of terms at the end of the new Draft standard also lists configuration object, but the item reference pointer is wrong and the term never appears in the text of clause 3. It has been replaced by configuration item, which has the exact same definition here in the Draft that configuration object has in the 2015 edition.
****** The concept "Support" from the 2015 edition is covered by the concept "People aspects" in the new DIS.
Thank you for this great overview of the updates! It’s interesting to see how these revisions reflect the evolving priorities of the committee.
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