A quality management system is a management system designed to meet the quality needs and objective of the organisation. Quality can be described as 'fitness for purpose' or 'fulfilling requirements'. These requirements can be anything important to the organisation or customers - such as cost, durability, availability, size, weight, or many other factors. As such, quality can be almost anything.
The ISO 9000 standard defines a management system as a "system to establish policy and objectives and to meet those objectives" (ISO 9000:2000, 3.2.2). Management systems are usually a collection of policies and processes used by an organisation, and by knowing the objectives we have some guidance as to what the policies need to achieve.
Quality management systems, often called a QMS, are about meeting the quality objectives. Organisations can have other management systems as well, such as a safety management system or environmental management system. While splitting these individual management systems is quite common, if you accept the definition that quality is anything that effects whether we fulfill requirements, or whether our services and products are 'fit for purpose', then it isn't much of a stretch in thinking to take all these management systems as being variants of quality management systems. Examples of management systems along with typical standards could include:
Quality management system, QMS (ISO 9001),
Environmental management system, EMS (ISO 14001),
Safety management system, SMS (AS/NZS 4801, BS OHSAS 18001, and the soon to be published ISO 45001 expected in 2016),
IT Service management system, ITSM (ISO/IEC 20000, ITIL)
Information Security Management System, ISMS (ISO 27001)
Project management system, PMS (ISO 21500, PRINCE2, SCRUM, MSP)
There are a number of published sets of quality management principles. Probably the most universally adopted at this time are the ISO 9001 set of principles.
Customer focus,
Leadership,
Involvement of people,
Process approach,
System approach to management,
Continual improvement,
Factual approach to decision making,
Mutually beneficial supplier relationships.
While these principles are from the ISO 9000 series of standards, these or reasonably similar principles are seen across many management systems.
With many management systems having common or similar requirements, some organisations chose to combine the management systems into a combined "integrated management system". A common combination is an integrated management systems covering quality, safety and environment systems, although other combinations can be used.
Quality management systems aimed at specific application areas are often giving different names, such as project management systems or safety management systems. The same holds true in information systems management where probably the best known quality management system is ITIL - the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. ITIL was developed by the UK Government to provide a best practice standard for information technology service management. ITIL draws heavily from standard quality management thinking including customer focus, demand management, service design, service management and continuous improvement, and is highly aligned to the ISO 20000 series standards. In fact, an ITIL based system is a great start towards a ISO 20000 compliant system.
Another common quality system in information technology is the information security management system, or ISMS. A number of recognised standards exist with strong local or regional following, but the most globally recognised is probably the ISO 27000 series standards, with ISO 27001 being the standard used for third party certification if required.
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Copyright 2015 Edward Hall. All rights reserved.
Last revised 10 July 2015.