Quality Management, in a project context, is all about the balancing of activities to drive continuous improvement of the project and the core of project delivery. Using a robust Quality Management approach will help ensure the project meets the success criteria defined by the client. The three processes associated with Project Quality Management are:
1. Quality Planning – Quality planning identifies the standards which are relevant to the project and how to assure the standards are achieved; 2. Perform Quality Assurance – Performing Quality Assurance is the execution of the planned quality activities during project execution; and 3. Perform Quality Control – Performing Quality Control is the process of monitoring deliverables to evaluate whether they comply with the project’s quality standards/criteria and identifying how to remove causes of unsatisfactory performance.
There are four elements relating to Quality Management that are particularly important to lay the foundation for the three processes above. Quality is part of the ‘triple constraint’ (time, cost, quality/scope) and refers to the fulfilment of stakeholder requirements detailed within the Project Scope Document. The four elements are:
1. Customer Satisfaction – Customer satisfaction is the understanding, evaluation, definition, and management of expectations so that customer requirements are met. This approach requires conformance to requirements and a fitness of use for the product or service. 2. Prevention over inspection – Prevention over inspection is the common sense principal that the cost of preventing mistakes is generally much less than the cost of correcting them. (Especially when they are uncovered during an inspection) 3. Management responsibility – Management responsibility in quality is to provide the resources needed to sustain success. 4. Continuous improvement – Continuous improve is following the plan-do-check-act cycle of quality improvement.
Quality Management
Quality Management, in a project context, is all about the balancing of activities to drive continuous improvement of the project and the core of project delivery. Using a robust Quality Management approach will help ensure the project meets the success criteria defined by the client. The three processes associated with Project Quality Management are: