Project Quality Management

Project Quality
Management – A Quick
Guide
By Stephanie Ray
|
May 9, 2018
https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/project-quality-management-quick-guide
(30/7/20)
Track projects in real time and ensure quality. Try
ProjectManager.com and get award-winning dashboards and
reporting tools to improve your project and quality management.
When you’re managing a project, the Triple
Constraint is always foremost in your head. How can
you control the scope, schedule and cost of the project?
But there is a fourth concern that is just as important and is
sometimes forgotten in the maelstrom of project
management, and that is quality.
It doesn’t matter if you got the best project management
tools, met every milestone and completed the project under
budget if the deliverable didn’t meet quality standards.
That’s why project quality management is so important.
What Is Project Quality Management?
Project quality management encompasses the processes
and activities that are used to figure out and achieve the
quality of the deliverables of a project. However, quality
can be an elusive word.
What is quality? While we could go on forever about the
“true” meaning of quality and use the Socratic method to
dialogue on its many possible meanings, for project
management the answer is more defined.
Quality is simply what the customer or stakeholder needs
from the project deliverables. By keeping the definition tied
to the customer or stakeholder, quality management can
have a narrower focus, which means it’s more likely to
achieve its goals.
Project Quality Management Concepts
Project managers oversee implementing a project quality
management plan. The main idea, again, to deliver a
product or service to the specifications of the customer or
stakeholder. Doing so requires knowing quality
management concepts.
Customer Satisfaction
Without customer satisfaction there can be no quality. Even
if a deliverable meets all aspects of what the customer or
stakeholder has required but is done so where the process
itself was not to satisfactory, then there’s a problem.
Of course, the deliverable must meet with agreed upon
requirements or else the project has failed because the
product of the project and the management of the project
didn’t meet with the expectations of the customer or
stakeholder.
Related: What is Stakeholder Theory?
That’s why implementing quality control means managing
both process and people. Meet with your customer or
stakeholder regularly to keep them abreast of the project’s
progress. Get their feedback and make sure that you’re
being fully transparent with them to avoid issues arising
later.
Prevention Over Inspection
Quality doesn’t come free. The Cost of Quality (COQ) is the
money spent dealing with issues during the project, and
then after the project, to fix any failures. These are broken
up into two categories: cost of conformance and cost of
nonconformance.
The cost of conformance can be considered a preventive
cost. These costs are primarily related to training, the
documentation process, equipment needed, and the time
required to get the quality done right. Other costs related to
this can include testing, destructive testing loss and
inspections.
The cost of nonconformance refers to internal failure costs.
These consist of having to rework something or even scrap
it entirely. Further costs can come from liabilities, warranty
work and lost business.
Continuous Improvement
This concept of quality project management can be found in
Six Sigma and Total Quality Management (TQM) and is
featured dominantly in the Prevention Over Inspection
concept.
This concept is, as explained in its title, an ongoing effort to
address improvements of the deliverables over time.
Whether through small, incremental changes or through
large ones, the opportunity to identify and address change
is always present.
Applying this concept also means constantly monitoring and
documenting any issues that come up, so you can then use
the lessons learned when managing future projects. This
way, you run a more efficient project and likely won’t
repeat mistakes.
Related: Lessons Learned Template
How to Implement Quality Project
Management
Once you have an idea of the different concepts, the next
step is to implement a project quality management plan. To
do so, follow these three steps.
Plan Quality
First identify the requirements for the quality of the
deliverable and how the project needs to be managed.
Agree on how this process will be documented and how that
information will be delivered. Will you have regular
meetings, emails, etc.?
The plan will include these specifics as well as metrics for
measuring the quality while managing the project. This
should include a quality checklist to collect and organize the
marks you need to hit during the project.
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance, according to the American Society for
Quality (ASQ) is “the planned and systemic activities
implemented in a quality system so that quality
requirements for a product or service will be fulfilled.”
Use quality assurance to make sure your processes are in
fact working towards making the project deliverables meet
quality requirements. Two ways to accomplish this is by
using a process checklist and a project audit.
Quality Control
Every process needs a policeman, so to speak, to make
sure that the rules are being following and that the
expected quality is being met. Some ways to ensure that
the required quality of the deliverables is being achieved is
through peer reviews and testing.
It’s essential to check the quality of the deliverables during
the project management process in order to adjust the
deliverables if they’re not meeting the standards that have
been set. This can be done at the end of the project, but it’s
not as efficient to redo rather than to readjust.
The Process of Project Quality
Management
Managing the process of project quality involves many
things, such as setting quality targets for your team to
meet, defining how to measure those quality targets and
reporting on them. Project management tools can prove
helpful with this.
Using ProjectManager.com to Manage Quality
ProjectManager.com comes with a dashboard, which is one
screen where you can view the metrics of every aspect of
the project. The data is usually shown in easy-to-read
charts and graphs, which can then be shared or printed out
for presentations.
The data for our dashboard is updated in real-time and
provides the most accurate measurement for the project’s
progress. This makes responding to quality issues timelier,
and it becomes less likely such issues will develop further
into problems that can sidetrack the project.
Online Gantt Charts for Quality Management
Plans
Online Gantt charts make scheduling and monitoring tasks
related to quality management simple. With
ProjectManager.com, you can upload a task list or
spreadsheet, which is then instantly populated on a
timeline.
All you need to do is add the duration of each task and
assign it. Of course, you can also use our Gantt chart
software to quickly build your project from scratch.
ProjectManager.com’s Interactive Gantt Chart
Our online Gantt chart can also provide a great
collaborative platform for your team. Each task is usually
able to link to supporting documents, images and other
files, as well as offering a dialogue where team members
can talk about the task and resolve any issues that arise.
Instead of having to micromanage everything, by giving
teams the autonomy to collaborate, they’ll catch the issue
first. They’re the ones on the frontline of the project, after
all. They can then respond, or report back to you. Plus, with
task lists and kanban boards, your team can work on their
tasks in whatever way they see fit.
Kanban boards are great for visual task management
Thanks to the diverse feature set of ProjectManager.com,
the quality of the deliverable can be addressed before it
moves too far away from its intended target. Quality is
always on the verge of deteriorating, so having online tools
that update immediately can be the difference between a
successful project and a failed one.
Quality is important in any project, and to ensure quality,
the right tools are needed to monitor the quality
management. ProjectManager.com is a cloud-based
software with a real-time dashboard and an online Gantt
chart that make monitoring and reporting on quality
easy. See for yourself by taking this free 30-day trial.