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Glossary

Quality objective

A measurable result that the organisation seeks to achieve, consistent with the quality policy and aligned with strategic direction.

Source standard: ISO 9001:2015 §6.2

A quality objective under ISO 9001:2015 clause 6.2 is more than a slogan. The standard requires the organisation to establish quality objectives at relevant functions, levels, and processes; for each objective the organisation must:

  1. Determine what will be done.
  2. Determine what resources will be required.
  3. Determine who will be responsible.
  4. Determine when it will be completed.
  5. Determine how the results will be evaluated.

This makes the objective auditable. A quality objective stated as “deliver excellent customer service” fails on every count: it has no measure, no resource estimate, no owner, no deadline, no evaluation method. A quality objective stated as “reduce customer-reported defects in product line A from 3.2 to 2.0 per 1,000 units by 2026-Q4, owned by the QA lead, reviewed monthly using the support-ticket dashboard” satisfies all five requirements.

Quality objectives connect downward to operational planning under clause 8 and upward to the management review inputs under clause 9.3. The most common implementation gap is silent objectives — listed once in a policy document, then never reviewed. Auditors look for the review trail: monthly KPI dashboards, quarterly check-ins, annual recalibration as part of management review.

A practical pattern is to anchor each quality objective to a metric that already lives in an operational dashboard so review is automatic. If the objective is to “improve first-pass yield from 92 percent to 95 percent,” the operational dashboard already tracks first-pass yield and the management review owner sees it without extra reporting.

See: ISO 9001 implementation guide, management review minutes template, risk-based thinking.

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