Introduction

Imagine that you are sitting in a restaurant waiting for your food order to come out. When it does, you realize that your seafood is not cooked correctly and the chef forgot the vegetables that come with the dish. As a customer, you expect your food to come out with the best quality and for the staff to have the best service possible. This is the same process IT project managers and project stakeholders go through. As a project manager, your stakeholders expect you and the project team to take into consideration their requirements, wants, and needs for a project. Without doing that, you risk unsatisfied customers and a bad reputation for the company. This is why project quality management is important in the project cycle. In this blog I will explain what project quality management is and how to plan it properly.

What Is Project Quality Management?

Project quality management is to ensure that the project meets both written requirements and other needs that are undertaken. As stated before, quality management is an important step of a project. It is as important as cost, time and scope. Oftentimes you and the project team may need to adjust cost, time, and scope to satisfy stakeholder wants and needs. If a stakeholder reviews the progress of the project but feels as though there are some quality issues, this is when you would make those adjustments. You should be actively checking the quality of the deliverables. And making sure that they meet the standards. The project team should also be sure to consider the stakeholders wants and needs and not just the written requirements. To do this, they must understand exactly what the customers want and what quality means to them. In the end, the customer is the one that will accept the quality of the project so never ignore the customer's needs.

There are three processes to project quality management. These include planning quality management, managing quality, and controlling quality. However, in this blog I will discuss with you the planning of quality management.

How to Plan Quality Management?

Now that you know what quality management is and why it is important, you may be wondering how you would approach it. Let's go over the planning of it. A quality management plan should have the ability to foresee scenarios and plan actions that result in the desired outcome. In other words, quality management should be able to prevent defects by selecting the proper materials, training people in quality, and planning the best process for the best outcomes. You should be able to think ahead and plan for unexpected situations that can disrupt the quality of products. Every project will have a unique set of quality standards. When you identify those standards, you can then design quality into the products of a project. 

There are four steps for you to make a quality management plan. These include:

• Development of a Quality Plan

To develop a quality plan, you first need to understand what the customer/ users need. An easy way to do this is to conduct research and to interview them. They will help give you more information that you need to consider with the professional standards for the product. In a perfect world, you will be able to balance both sides to make a quality deliverable. 

• Execution of the Plan

Now that you have what you need for the plan, it is time to execute it. While tasks are being performed, make sure that they meet the quality standards that have been gathered. As tasks progress and change, communication between you, the project manager, stakeholders, and the project team will be critical.

• Quality Checks

You want to continuously improve in regards to quality. This means that you need to perform quality checks throughout the life cycle of a project. You can document that standards are being met and any changes you think should be made. This information will be useful in meetings with stakeholders.

• Make Corrections

If you found any changes that you think should be made then you should make those corrections. This is necessary because it will get things back on track and moving in the right direction. 

A technique that you can use for a quality plan is called design of experiments. This technique allows you to identify what will have the most influences on the outcome of the process. Understanding these variables are important because their effect on the outcome is a critical part of quality planning. 

For It projects, there will be some scope aspects that can affect quality. These aspects include:

• Functionality and Features

Functionality means that a system is working as it is supposed to and features are the variables of a system that are appealing to the users. There are some functions and features that are required for a system to perform and some are optional for a system to perform. Be sure to make those distinctions.

• System Outputs

Screens and reports that are generated by the system are called system outputs. System Outputs need to be clearly defined for what they would look like to a system. For example, are users able to get reports in a user-friendly format?

• Performance

Performance regards how well the system a product is working for the user’s needs. Stakeholders should discuss any issue for the design of the product to be high-performance.

• Reliability

Under normal conditions, a product should work as it was intended to.

• Maintainability

Maintainability regards how well a product is able to be serviced on.

Conclusion

As you can see, quality management is important for a project. You have to balance the quality standards of your stakeholders, users, and your business. To understand what a user needs, you can conduct research and interview sessions. To balance the standards you are given, you should make a quality management plan, execute it, perform quality checks, and make any corrections that you find. This can lead to adjustments for the scope, time, and cost of a project. Also keep in mind that many scope aspects can affect the quality of a product. When you are able to accomplish this, you, the project team, stakeholders, and customers, will be satisfied with the final quality of the product. 

Resources

Information Technology Project Management Textbook, e9, Schwalbe, Kathy.

"The Quality Management Plan in Project Management"

https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/quality-management-plan

"What is Project Quality Management, and Why is it Important?"

https://www.forecast.app/blog/what-is-project-quality-management