The article summarizes the conclusions of the research project The Impact of the Standards of Quality of Social Services before they were enacted. This project focused on exploring the influence of municipal policy of social services in a selected municipality on the provision of local social services. In more specific terms, we concentrated on understanding the role of the Standards of Quality of Social Services within municipal policy, and the significance of municipal policy for establishing this tool within the culture of providing personal social services in a selected nongovernmental organization. The case study revealed a range of both internal and external factors which have had a major impact on the manner of implementation of the Standards of Quality in the field of the selected social service. We concentrated particularly on identifying the various types of obstacles that may hinder effective embedding of the Standards of Quality in the culture of service provision. The findings were then subjected to a broad debate amongst both theoreticians and practitioners and generalized into two distinct notions of implementation of the Standards of Quality in the providers organizations: the administrative and the service-oriented model. The study is intended not only for authors of social policy at various levels, but contains information and recommendations directly valuable to providers of social services and helpful for introducing the Standards of Quality in their organizations.