At the SQA’s Quality College, I presented a workshop on Quality Culture. In interests of time, I glossed over the ISOs and wanted to come back and treat them in more detail.

ISO 9000 is a set of international standards on quality management and quality assurance developed to help companies effectively document the quality system elements needed to maintain an efficient quality system. Designed to be general in approach, they are not specific to any one industry and can be applied to organizations of any size.

There are some 25 series 9000 standards, with the core for this topic being:

• ISO 9000 Quality management systems -Fundamentals and vocabulary
• ISO 9001 Quality management systems – Requirements
• ISO 9004 Managing for the sustained success of an organization – A quality management approach

The ISO 10000 series supports standards in the ISO 9000 series with more specific guidelines, there are several here relevant to the question of Quality Culture:

• ISO 10010 Quality management — Guidance to understand, evaluate and improve organizational quality culture
• ISO 10015 Quality Management – Guidelines for competence management and people development Training
• ISO 10018 Quality Management – Guidelines on People Involvement and Competence