ISO 9001 is a set of interrelated ideas, principles and rules and
could therefore be considered a system in the same way that we refer to the
metric system or the imperial system of measurement. ISO 9001 is both an
international standard and until year 2008, was a family of some 20
international standards. As a standard, ISO 9001 was divided into 4 parts with
part 1 providing guidelines on the selection and use of the other standards in
the family. The family of standards included requirements for quality
assurance and guidelines on quality management. Some might argue that none
of these are in fact standards in the sense of being quantifiable. The critics
argue that the standards are too open to interpretation to be standards
anything that produces such a wide variation is surely an incapable process
with one of its primary causes being a series of objectives that are not
measurable. However, if we take a broader view of standards, any set of rules,
rituals, requirements, quantities, targets or behaviours that have been agreed
by a group of people could be deemed to be a standard. Therefore by this
definition, ISO 9001 is a standard.
