Many of you as project managers have had interactions with ISO standards.
You may have been involved in an ISO audit (usually with ISO 9000 Family Standards - we'll come back to that later).
You may have overseen a project to train people on ISO standards. You simply may have had to take a mandatory class on ISO because, well, because it was MANDATORY.
This blog post is about some of those standards, but most importantly, it brings you the important message that sustainability is now threaded through the most popular standard - the ISO 9000 family.
First, let's look at the "purpose-built" standards. To do that, rather than spend a lot of time with text here, we've provided embedded videos of just a few minutes each, which tell the story from ISO's perspective.
Below you will find three videos - one on Environmental standards (ISO 14000 family), then IS 26000 (Social Responsibility) and then ISO 50001 (Energy Systems).
Besides these, ISO 21500is a dedicated ISO Standard ("Guidance on Project Management"), and this document, importantly, contains numerous sustainability connections. In fact, the very authors of your People, Planet, Profits & Projects blog worked with others on the committees which put this standard together to help assure that indeed it did include these threads. Now, we're applying that same energy to the PMBOK(R) Guide, 6th Edition to get that same sort of maturity in the PMI Standards.
But what really triggered this post was the fact that ISO 9001:2015 (and the 9000 series) which are all about quality. Per ISO themselves, this family of standards "ensure that ...products and services consistently meet customer’s requirements, and that quality is consistently improved". At our core, project managers are quality managers.
Side note: your blogging team actually presented this concept (project managers as quality managers) way back in 2000 in Mexico City at a Conference Board presentation - and it got a hugely positive response.
In any case, the newest version of ISO 9001 (called ISO 9001:2015) includes references (and requirements) related to sustainability. Here is ISO's own take on the new standard:
Of course, that element of sustainability and sustainable development is key for us. But there is more in here of interest to project managers, including the idea of "Risk-based thinking". We suggest that you take advantage of any organizational resources which help you get updated on the new version of this standard.
Get smart on the update - it will help you be a more sustainable-thinking PM. And if you want to learn more about sustainability, poke around in the other standards (especially ISO 14000 and ISO 21500) to see the interlocking starting to take place between PM standards and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) standards.
