In order to effectively transform business ideas into actions, you need a plan. A quality plan. Guidance on how to create one has just been updated, providing a powerful tool to complement any quality management system, including ISO 9001.
Producing something – whether it be a product, service, process or project – always involves a series of interconnected or complementary processes and tasks that have to be performed, and planning them effectively in advance often leads to better results. A quality plan helps organizations do just that, as it includes a specification of the actions, responsibilities and associated resources that are needed to achieve the desired outcomes. It is useful as it describes how an organization will actually go about producing the product or service and how these actions can have an impact on other processes or parts of the business. It is a particularly useful tool for validating new products, services or processes before the work begins and for demonstrating to stakeholders how their requirements are going to be met.
ISO 10005:2018, Quality management – Guidelines for quality plans, gives guidelines for establishing and applying quality plans, and it has just been updated to provide more guidance and more examples to be relevant to organizations of all shapes and sizes.
Roy Ackema, Convener of the working group that updated the standard, said that while it is not essential to have in place ISO 9001, ISO’s flagship standard for quality management systems, in order to benefit from the guidance of ISO 10005, the two standards are based on many of the same concepts and principles, making them highly complementary to each other.
“ISO 10005 was updated to reflect modern business practices,” he said.
“This includes improvements to the terminology and concepts as described in the 2015 version of ISO 9001, such as those related to addressing the needs and expectations of relevant parties and managing organizational knowledge.”
“It also offers more guidance on how to apply risk-based thinking to decide the processes, resources and methods to be used.”
ISO 10005 was developed by working group 26 of ISO technical committee ISO/TC 176/SC 2, Quality systems, the secretariat of which is held jointly by BSI, ISO’s member for the UK and SAC, ISO’s member for China.
Source: iso.org