Project Quality Management: All You Need to Know

Project Quality Management can often feel like an unloved part of project management. Too many basic books and guides to project management either mention is only in passing, or not at all.

On the smallest projects, with few products, we can probably take quality for granted. By this I mean that we can assume that a project manager will be reviewing the quality of everything you deliver, and making sure it’s right.

But, as projects get bigger, you cannot avoid active quality management.

So, in this guide to Project Quality Management, we’ll break it down into three parts. We’ll talk you through what each part is, why it matters, and – most important – what you need to do.

If you want to build a reputation for delivering high quality products, as well as meeting your budget and deadlines, you need to master Project Quality Management.

Why Quality Management Matters

There are lots of of good reasons why project quality management matters. But I always think there is one selfish reason that drives me to prioritize it:

Quality reflects on my reputation as a Project Manager”

When i remember that, I also remember that I need to keep quality at the forefront of my thinking throughout the project lifecycle.

So, I guess the question is, why is that?

Why does quality impact on my reputation, and the way people perceive me and my project?

1. Stakeholders

Firstly, there are you stakeholders’ requirements and preferences. The extent to which their perceptions of the quality of your deliverables match their expectations will drive their judgement of your performance. But let’s put it another way. This is the project management equivalent of customer care. The more you care about your customers and take care of their wants and needs… The more they will value you and your services.

2. Standards

Many projects also need to conform to a set of standards. These may be:

• External standards imposed upon you by third parties like Governments, regulators or customers in your value chain. These may include environmental, health & safety, or business standards set by accreditation organizations like the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
• Organizational standards imposed by your own (or your client’s) organization’s policies and procedures
• Project, program, or portfolio management standards imposed by your PMO (Project, Program, or Portfolio Management Office)
• Internal standards that you choose for your project

3. Reliability

The deliverables you produce will have a lifetime. And your or your organization’s reputation will be reflected in their reliability for that whole time. So, it is important that your stakeholders get what they can reasonably expect, throughout that period.

4. Value for Money (VfM)

We’ll talk about the trade-off between cost and quality in a moment. But often the measure of your project and its deliverables will be Value for Money. That is, how much value or benefit do they deliver, for the total cost that your project expended? If you set the quality bar too low, or if you miss your quality standards, this will adversely impact the VfM of your project. That can result in stakeholders considering it a failure.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ)

Cost of Quality (CoQ) refers to the financial costs from:

• Cost of Conformance
  Money spent during the project to avoid sub-standard products.
  These can be the costs of preventing the non-conformance (QA) or of spotting it before release (QC).
• Cost of Nonconformance
  Money spent during and after the project as a result of sub-standard products.
  These can be pre-release and therefore found by your project team (sometimes called ‘internal) or post release costs of problems found by the end users (sometimes called ‘external’).

The chart below is similar to, but not the same as Figure 8.5 of the PMBoK (PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge) 6th edition.

Time, Cost, and Quality

Often, decisions about quality are a trade-off on the Time Cost Quality Triangle – or the Iron Triangle. At the start of your project (during what we will call Quality Design) you will determine the quality you want. You will set this to balance your needs to:

• minimise the overall Cost of Quality and
• maximize conformance with stakeholder preferences

If your project is subject to a PMO or part of a wider program or portfolio, you may have certain quality design decisions set from the outset.

The Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK)

for me, the best easily accessible description of project quality management is in the pMI’s PMBoK. Yes, it is a dry read that is little more than a collation of the things you need to know. But that, after all is its purpose.

But the fact is that few other sources have as much to say about project quality management, and offer as comprehensive a collation of tools and techniques that you can use to manage quality on your project.

However, I shall deliberately avoid repeating much of what PMBoK says, for three reasons:

1. You can read it for yourself, so I’d be adding little value
2. It’s a collation of ideas, not a ‘How to’ guide
3. Copyright – you know: if I copy it, they sue me.

The Three Project Quality Management Processes

We can split Project Quality Management up into four distinct processes, that:

1. Decide what quality you want to achieve
2. Ensure you meet the quality standard you set
3. Check and document to ensure you got it right
4. Buy smartly to get what you want

We can summarize these with a simple table.

The Four Project Quality Management Processes

So, as you might expect, we’ll divide the main part of this guide into four sections:

1. Quality Design. Plan Quality Management
2. Quality Assurance. Manage Quality
3. Quality Control. Monitor, Record, and Control Quality
4. Quality Contracts: Procure Quality

I have also added a Process Summary diagram at the end.

Quality Design: Plan Quality Management

When it comes to substandard deliverables, as with your health, prevention better than cure. So we aim to design quality into our projects.

If you are studying for your PMP or CAPM, then in the PMBoK, process 8.1 Plan Quality Management will give you the Inputs, Tools & Techniques, and Outputs you need to know.

The most important things to know about quality design are that you need to develop:

1. Specifications for your each of your Products that include the quality standards you need to meet
2. Plans for how you will achieve these standards, using the other three processes we’ll look at in this article

Quality Design

I have already listed the standards to which you may need to comply, in the section on Why Quality Matters, above. And what you decide and how you articulate it will depend closely on the nature of your project and its deliverables.

Quality Management Plan

You will also need a plan for how you will ensure that your deliverables meet the standards in your specifications. I recommend your Quality Plan covers seven things:

1. Quality Expectations of your Stakeholders
2. Criteria against which quality can be assessed
3. The Quality Standards you will work to
4. Quality Assurance procedures
5. Quality Control procedures
6. Change Control process
7. Responsibilities of Team members

These seven things represent the sections of our Quality Plan template. This is one of over 50 project management templates in our Project Management Templates Kit.

You can download a PDF version of this template as a sample, below.

Project Quality Plan Template

Split into three stages, you can download your PDF Quality Plan here…

Quality Assurance: Manage Quality

The soul of Quality Assurance is a culture that values quality. This is one where:

• everyone knows the importance of quality to the project
• they understand the quality design requirements for each deliverable
• each team member has a true commitment to ensuring deliverables meet their specifictions

Because, as we said above: prevention better than cure.

In this case:

The big mistake is to think that a QA process guarantees quality. It does not. What it does is create a framework that makes quality easier to achieve. It’s only when people follow the process that quality becomes assured! Your QA process is likely to touch upon:

• Sourcing and procurement of components
• Operation and maintenance of equipment
• Checking and testing during development and product creation
• Reporting and recording of data
• Auditing and review of the process

And, of course, you need to tailor your project is QA processes to fit with your organization’s quality auditing procedures.

For long projects, aim for continuous improvement of your processes.

Agile

In Agile projects, continuous improvement is part of the mind-set. Review your project quality management processes during the retrospective at the end of each sprint

Quality Control: Monitor, Record, and Control Quality

If you cannot prevent a problem, the next best thing is to fix it before you make it public.

Prevention better than cure – but cure better than disease’

When you think about the Cost of Quality (which I described above), post-release non-conformities are almost always the most expensive. Even if they don’t damage your reputation, recalling a deliverable and putting it right is more costly than fixing it and releasing it in a correct state.

So create a Quality Control process to detect and correct faults before you commit to handover of a deliverable. There are costs to this even if you find no faults. But the aggregate is usually still below the cost of an undetected fault.

If you do find a fault, the QC process includes the procedure for re-working or re-creating the deliverable, as appropriate.

The tests and checks you apply in your Quality Control process will depend on the nature of your products. And the rigour of those tests will depend on your tolerance for failure. Or, to put it another way, the balance of CoQ for pre- and post-release defects.

Audit

Once again, you may need an audit process to review how your QC process is working. And you will also want to learn from that, to continuously improve your QC. Again, tailor this audit  régime to fit with your organization’s quality auditing procedures.

Reporting

Set up a reporting process, to communicate quality outcomes and actual costs of quality conformance.

Quality Contracts: Procure Quality

The gap in PMBoK’s otherwise excellent description of quality processes is the part that procurement plays. Any decent chef or home cook will tell you that the first thing you need, if you want high quality food, is high-quality ingredients. The same is true of project quality management.

It is not that PMBoK omits procurement management – it does not. But, to my mind, PMI does not draw the connections clearly enough.

There are a number of elements to this:

• Specifying the goods and services you need both accurately and precisely
• Inviting the right businesses to submit a tender
• Writing good Invitation to Tender documents and briefing prospective suppliers well
• Making a careful selection of the right bidder, rather than the cardinal sin of ‘picking the cheapest’
• Drafting an effective contract, with the right incentives for partnership working
• Crafting your relationship and working together as partners
• Managing the contract actively

You may also be interested in our Giant Guide to Project Procurement.

Project Quality Management Process Summary

Project Quality Management Process Summary

What is Your Perspective on Project Quality Management?

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