Project Quality Management

Course details

Project Quality Management is the process for ensuring that all project activities necessary to design, plan and implement a project are effective and efficient with respect to the purpose of the objective and its performance. Project quality management (QM) is not a separate, independent process that occurs at the end of an activity to measure the level of quality of the output. It is not purchasing the most expensive material or services available on the market. Quality and grade are not the same, grade are characteristics of a material or service such as additional features. A product may be of good quality (no defects) and be of low grade (few or no extra features).

In the execution of the lifecycle of work, planning, executing, and managing projects is an integral part of the workflow. Specifically, the knowledge area of project quality management includes the organizational processes that determine quality policies, objectives, and responsibilities. The PMBOK identifies three processes for quality management:

Quality Planning

Quality Assurance

Quality Control

Quality Planning. A good quality plan starts with a clear definition of the goal of the project. This includes assessing the risks to success, setting high standards, documenting everything, and defining the methods and tests to achieve, control, predict and verify success.

Quality Assurance. Quality assurance tests use a system of metrics to determine whether or not the quality plan is proceeding in an acceptable manner. By using both qualitative and quantitative metrics, you can effectively measure project quality with customer satisfaction.

Quality Control. Quality control involves operational techniques meant to ensure quality standards. This includes identifying, analyzing, and correcting problems. While quality assurance occurs before a problem is identified, quality control is reactionary and occurs after a problem has been identified.

Quality management is a continuous process that starts and ends with the project. It is more about preventing and avoiding than measuring and fixing poor quality outputs. It is part of every project management processes from the moment the project initiates to the final steps in the project closure phase.

QM focuses on improving stakeholder's satisfaction through continuous and incremental improvements to processes, including removing unnecessary activities; it achieves that by the continuous improvement of the quality of material and services provided to the beneficiaries. It is not about finding and fixing errors after the fact, quality management is the continuous monitoring and application of quality processes in all aspects of the project.