Overview

PARAGRAPH 5 contains requirements for specific activities that management performs in establishing and operating the quality system. The early introduction of management responsibility correctly emphasizes the need for securing and continually renewing management commitment and involvement. Although, regrettably, no sources external to ISO are credited in the standard, the priority placed on management activities reiterates the experience and conclusions of many experts, including Juran, ¹ Deming, ² and Crosby, ³ and is consistent with the many quality programs and models derived from their work. Management works on behalf of the stakeholders to establish and maintain goals and conditions of employment. Management hires, fires, rewards, and corrects. Management plans and oversees the investment of resources and budget. What management pays attention to is what gets done. Joseph Juran aptly sums up the importance of management when he states, simply, that "our quality problems have been planned that way" (p. vii). ¹ In relating these quality problems to management's responsibility for an organization's assets, Juran goes on to echo Crosby in identifying the costs of poor quality resources expended to redo things that went wrong because of poor quality as 20 to 40 percent of sales. ^[*]

Watts Humphrey, in Managing the Software Process, identifies six basic principles for process change. The first principle is "senior management leadership is required to launch the change effort and to provide continuing resources and priority." ⁴

In 1995, The Standish Group reported frequently quoted results from a survey of the U.S.