Quality Management
The old adage about quality being in the eyes of the beholder is true - quality is ultimately measured by your client. Your goal is to understand the client’s requirements and expectations - and then meet those expectations. This is a critical concept about quality. Sometimes there is a tendency to think that ‘quality’ means the best material, the best equipment and absolutely zero defects. However, in most cases, the client does not expect, and cannot afford, a perfect solution. On the other hand, a flawlessly designed, defect-free solution that does not meet the client’s needs is not considered high quality.
Determine the client requirements for quality
Work with your client to determine their requirements for quality. These are the detailed characteristics that are important to the customer. The high-level characteristics of quality can be uncovered during the project definition process. The detailed quality requirements should be uncovered when you gather business requirements.
Create a Quality Plan
Develop a Quality Plan to identify the major deliverables, completeness and correctness criteria, quality control activities and quality assurance activities. The Quality Plan allows you to understand when the deliverables are complete as well as how to show they are correct. The Quality Plan also describes how you will ensure that the client’s quality requirements are achieved. It is the place to describe the processes and activities that will be put into place to ensure that quality deliverables are produced. The Quality Plan describes the quality assurance and quality control activities used on the project. The actual activities needed to implement these processes need to be identified and included in the schedule to ensure they are completed.
Define a set of metrics to validate quality requirements are met
Identify a set of metrics that will provide insight into the progress of the project and the processes used to create deliverables. The project manager should already be capturing overall financial and duration metrics. The quality-related metrics need to be more sophisticated. There are two areas where you are trying to manage quality - in your project work processes and in the actual deliverables you are building. You should try to capture metrics that will measure each.
Execute quality assurance activities
During the project, conduct all of the quality assurance activities as specified in the project schedule.
Execute quality control activities
Ensure that the quality control activities for every deliverable are performed while the project is underway. At a minimum, you should have a visible deliverable review process.
Update and monitor the Quality Plan
Evaluate the Quality Plan on a monthly basis or at the completion of major milestones. The review should focus on whether the Quality Plan is still adequate to ensure that the project deliverables are completed within the quality expectations of the client. If it is not, update the Quality Plan with changes and update the schedule with any new or modified activities required.
Collect metrics to validate you are meeting quality requirements
During the project, capture the metrics. Most should be captured monthly. Some, like client satisfaction surveys, may be captured quarterly. If you are building or manufacturing something tangible, you may want to collect automated product-based metrics every day.
Analyze metrics for process improvement opportunities
Analyze the metrics to determine how your project work processes can be improved. For instance, the deliverable review process might be changed from one review when the deliverable is completed to add an extra review when the deliverable is 50% complete. The time required for this draft review might be more than offset by dramatically reducing errors found when the deliverable is complete. In another example, for a manufacturing process, you may need to upgrade equipment, send the operators to more training or invest in better raw materials.
Analyze and resolve quality related problems
When quality problems are found, implement a process to determine the cause and to make improvements in the process.
Implement the improvements that were identified
There may be more ideas than you can safely implement in one review cycle. If you find that to be the case, prioritize the suggestions and implement those that seem to have the highest value but require the least amount of work. You may be able to implement other ideas on the next review and analysis cycle.
Continue to measure
You may need to identify new or revised metrics to support new or revised work processes.
Review key learnings at the end of the project
At the end of your project, provide feedback to the organization on the results of your quality process and report the final metrics captured. These can be leveraged for an organization-wide metrics program and provide input into best practices that can be used again on other projects. This step is bypassed if your organization does not collect standard project metrics.
