ISO 9000 Family

ISO 9000 Family

Standard Approach

Every individual has his or her own way of working and their own whims and fancies. Thus an individual will perform very excellent job based on the available strengths, knowledge and experience acquired over a period of time.  However this may not be true for another individual who has different way of working, different strengths and traits. Here we are talking of just two individuals, imagine you have a group of say fifteen people and accomplish a certain task from this group.  Management faces a great challenge in bringing them together and achieve a certain task.  In such situation, we should have a standard approach for the entire team then it becomes a unique protocol for everyone.

Software Development Services

Consider an example of software development, where we need to develop a solution which meets the customer requirement. As per standard development process below tasks are involved at a broader level under this process.

1.      Requirement Analysis: Here business analyst understands the user requirement and defines the user requirement.

2.      System Design: Here software designer will understand the requirement defined by Business Analyst and will design the solution to suit the requirement.

3.      Software Development: In this phase software developers will start the engineering activities to build the actual software code using the identified technology.

4.      Software Testing: A testing team will carry out the testing for any defects and make sure that defined solution meets the user requirement.

5.      User Acceptance Testing: In this phase actual solution would be deployed on temporary environment for users to verify that solution built is fit fir for purpose

6.      Deployment on Production: Here the complete solution would be provided to the customer for their usage.

Number of people involved in development of the solution depends on the size and complexity of the Solution.

Why we need multiple standards

In the above example following aspects needs to be considered on larger scale.

1.      Quality of the product or solution provided should be excellent.

2.      People working on ground should have proper facilities in terms of work space, cleanliness, hygiene etc.

3.      If developed software needs to be deployed over internal then it should satisfy various security requirement to avoid any hacking or data theft.

A common set of standard can’t be applied to for quality, ergonomics and security hence ISO came up with different level of certificate

Different types of ISO Standards and Certifications

At base of every standard there are management processes. A combination of processes and their systematic integration makes a system.  Let’s take an example of computer operating system as depicted in below diagram. Here various independent processes or components (e.g. Application, Monitor, Keyboard, Printer etc.) are integrated to achieve desired output in terms of execution any application software.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this way if we have to achieve good quality we need to define Quality Management System (QMS) which is combination of various processes. Thus QMS is backbone or basic requirement of any organization. An organization gets qualified for ISO 9000 certification only if they define and maintain QMS on regular basis.

 

 

 

ISO 9000 is entire family of standards including ISO 9001. ISO 9000 defines all terminology used within this category.  At the same time ISO 9000 is also in individual standard.  The main purpose is to define guidelines for standard.  This can be also called as collection of vocabulary and definition for Quality Management system (QMS).

ISO 9000 series is based on seven quality management principles as below:

1.      Customer Focus,

2.      Leadership,

3.      People Engagement

4.      Process Approach

5.      Improvement

6.      Evidence Based Decision Making

7.      Relationship Management

 

 

ISO 9001 is a set of standards which helps organization to ensure they meet customer and other stakeholder needs. Designated certification bodies provides confirmation that organization meets ISO 9001 standards based on the independent assessment and subsequently issues ISO certification. Thus ISO does not issue any certificate directly, just like defining the curriculum for any degree however actual degree is issues by a recognized university. 

Initial version of ISO 90001 was published in 1987 names as “ISO 9001:1987”.  Depending n the latest industry trends ISO revisits the standards and releases the revised version.  The latest version released was “ISO 90001:2015”.    Earlier it was “ISO 90001:2008” which is no more valid. Thus with the introduction of any new version organization should update their QMS in line with the latest standards.