Michelle: With your latest article, can you tell us how you decided to write about this topic or why it's important?

Michael: Oh my gosh. I write about a lot of quality topics. In addition to the writing that I do for isoTracker, I also have a blog out on the heading pragmatic quality, where I put out something once a week on different kinds of topics and There, like all blogging, it's a little rough and ready. But sometimes it happens that there will be something in there that when I'm later talking with Christopher Stainow from isoTracker, they'll say, well, if you could polish that up a little bit, we could probably use that as well for our material.

Anyway, back in the spring, there's currently (efforts) under way to update the ISO standards, ISO 9000 and ISO 9001. And so, as part of this, I thought it would be interesting to look at the contents of those standards. And, in particular, I was looking at ISO 9000, which is a companion standard that has a lot of vocabulary and background information.

And that also contains a list of seven of the management principles. So, I ended up and wrote about one principle a week for a string of seven weeks, along with bracketing pieces at the beginning. Why these principles in particular? And one at the end about why are we only discovering these now? Why is this new work being done now? We didn't know about it a hundred years ago.

Anyway, when I was talking to Christopher and he said, well, the general idea is interesting, but it's too long. It's too much material. And, you know, it could probably be used to be polished up a little bit. So, I reduced it into the article that you've now published. So that's how it came about. It was because of the work that's being done to update the standard and trying to revisit what it currently says today.

Michelle: Yeah, that's definitely a timely topic. I think whenever readers hear ISO update their ears, you know, perk up or it's always something to be aware of. So, I'll think it seems like mid next year is the new (target), something like that.

Michael: Yeah, there's been some hiccups in the schedule as it's gone along. But I think the current estimate is that because there's a defined timeline that these updates are supposed to follow. But then when you get long discussions on current topics, sometimes, (and it) happened with the 9001 standard, some of the topics generated enough discussion that they actually went back to do a second rough draft so that extended the schedule some. Originally. I think they were aiming for this year. But, currently, I think the estimation is a little bigger, sometime next year.

Michelle: Yes. Definitely something to watch.