Quality management incorporates the quality policy regarding planning, managing, controlling project and quality standard of products in order to meet the objectives set by the stakeholders. The process behind project quality management is plan quality management, manage quality and control quality. These are processes that make sure project quality management does an effective job in raising the project standard to the stakeholder’s requirement.

The plan quality management focuses on the quality of workers that needs to be done to meet the final objective of the object, the management quality process makes sure quality requirements are identified during the plan quality management process. And finally, control quality is more concerned with comparing the work results with quality requirements. It decides whether the final result is acceptable or not.

Key Concept for project quality management #

Project quality management contains management of the project and deliverables of the project as well. Quality measures and techniques are specific to the type of deliveries that are being made by the project. The approach has to be different when they are being used to create different products. Every approach is unique and is helpful to achieve that product or project. Failing to meet the quality requirements will have serious negative consequences on the project’s stakeholders.

• Meeting the customer requirement by crunching the project team will result in decreased profiles and at the same time increased level of risks, negative views on the company.
• Rushing plans will always result in degradation in quality, undetected errors, decreased profits, and post-implementation risks.

The job of a project manager is to manage the tradeoffs associated with quality and grade. While some people have the misconception thinking both of them are the same. But they are actually quite different. Quality ensures the project maintains the inherent characters as per requirements, a grade is more stable for design intent as they ensure the project has the same functional use and different technical characteristics.

• The problem arises if a high-grade product has low-quality defects engraved in it. This will result in high-grade products making ineffective outcomes.
• The problem may not arise if the low-grade product has high-quality features. Then the product will get used as normal without any deal breakers.

More attention also gets paid to prevention over inspection. The idea is to design a better quality into deliverables than to spend time finding quality issues in them. Preventing mistakes is considered to be a far more valuable approach to the problem than taking the cost of correcting THE mistakes during the final or middle stages. 

What are the approaches to quality management?

• Let the customer find the defects, this can lead to warranty issues, recalls, loss of reputation, and additional rework costs.
• Detect and correct the defects before the deliverables get sent to the customer. 
• Examining and correcting the process instead of only treating the special defects
• Implementing the quality into planning and designing of the project and product.
• Creating a culture throughout the organization.

Trends and Emerging practices in project quality management #

Completion of new trends makes the overall flow of the object run more smoothly without going through any critical error or mistakes which usually comes when the old practices take the center stage in the modern world. Project quality magnet delivers results by following the latest trend and optimizing the current setup to meet the standard of the new.

Customer satisfaction  #

Here the customer expectation gets met through understanding, evaluating, defining, and manning the requirements.

Continual improvement #

Quality improvement initiatives are placed to improve the quality of the project management as well as the quality of the end product, service, and result.

Management responsibility  #

Participation of all members of the project team is what leads the project to reach its competition before reaching the due date.

Mutually beneficial partnership with suppliers #

The relationship between supplier and organization is interdependent. If the relationship is based on partnership and cooperation then the supplier will be more beneficial to the organization than the traditional supplier management. It is much better if the organization prefers to go down the route of long-term relationships over short-term gains.

These are the key concepts that make sure the project quality manager stays efficient all throughout the project without diminishing the quality of the project and product. To navigate the changes, agile methods get used to checking on quality and review steps that are built throughout the project rather than the end of it. Regular check-ups ensure the effectiveness of the quality process. Looking at the root cause of issues rather than suggesting trials of new approaches provides a solution to fix the issue and improve the quality at the end.

Plan Quality Management #

This process helps identify the quality requirement and standard that has been set for the project. It also manages the deliverables and documentation aspect of the project on how the project will demonstrate the quality requirements and or standards. The key benefit of having the plan quality management is its impact on the flow of the project. It provides direction and a sense of guidance on how everything on the project is supposed to get managed and verified all throughout the project.

Quality planning gets performed alongside other planning processes. The techniques of the plan quality manager are what helps the overall quality management of the project. This section will cover all the most important details about the plan quality management and how it anchovies its work.

Plan Quality Management Tools and Techniques

Expert Judgement #

Having to call out the right solution in a challenging time will save a lot of time-wasting on finding it. The expert judgment also gives a special knowledge that will help with maintaining quality assurance, quality control, quality measurements, quality improvements, quality systems.

Data gathering #

Hee is another way to check the quality of the project. Data gathering provides various tools to the management to perform quality checkups in an informal manner without spending too much on speculation. The information here is all statistical so it can help the solution to be far more effective.

 Normally the process of data gathering in the plan quality management process is  done through:

• Benchmarking – here the comparison between actual project practices and the quality standards gets performed to benefit the best practices, create ideas for improvements, and provide a basis for measuring performance
• Brainstorming -it is a process of gathering data from a group of team members or experts to create a quality management plan that fits the upcoming project.
• Interviews- quality depends on the execution from stakeholders. Interviewing experienced project participants, stakeholders, and experts will reveal the grand picture of quality to the forefront.

Data analysis #

Data analysis gives valuable information that helps out with the project a lot in the long run. A project will go through a cost-benefit analysis that helps estimate the strengths and weaknesses of the alternatives presented.  Cost of quality if the project has more than 3 or 4 costs such as prevention cost, appraisal cost, and failure cost.

Decision making #

This will help the management deal with multi-criteria decision analysis. Tools specialized in multicriteria decision analysis can be used to figure out key issues and suitable alternatives for implementation. Criteria get weight and prioritized before they have a section to apply. Normally they will get ranked by a score that is used in the process.

Data Representations #

Data to be more accurate has to be represented in a sensible manner. The manner of representation has to be direct with the information. Here the use of flowcharts, logical data model, matrix diagrams, and mind mapping is used to show the data in a careful manner without making any errors. All the variants mentioned above do an excellent job of previewing the major details of the data and information on the surface.

Test and Inspection planning #

This process determines the test and inspection of the product, deliverable, or service to the expectations set by the stakeholders. Alongside meeting the requirements set by stakeholders, it also includes the goal of product performance and reliability.

Meeting #

Project teams hold planned meetings to create a quality management plan. The project manager, project sponsor, team members, selected stakeholders can get involved in the development of a quality management plan.

Manage Quality #

Manage quality covers the quality management plan into executable quality activities. The big impact of management quality is that it raises the quality objectives as well as identifying ineffective processes and finding out the causes of poor quality. This process largely depends on the data and results from the control quality process to reflect the overall quality status of the project. Unlike other processes, managing quality will get performed throughout the project.

This process is also known as quality assurance, although the definition of both of them may not have any similarities at all. Manage quality process includes a set of planned and systematic acts and processes that are defined in the project’s quality management. The project manager and the team may use the organization’s quality assurance department to execute some of the managed quality activities. Normally the quality assurance departments have a cross organizational experience that uses quality tools and techniques for the project.

The overview of managing quality is seen as the work of everybody. It includes the project magner, project team, project sponsor, the management, even the customer. Roles are different but they do play it in the making of the management quality.

Tools and techniques #

Data gathering #

Data gathering techniques are used to include checklists. A checklist is a tool that is more component-specific. It ensures if the required steps have been performed or to see if the requirements have been met. It tackles simplistic and complex subjects to strengthen the project.

Data analysis #

Data analysis gives a proper view of how things should proceed in the organization. The objective is always to create a proper route for the project to move without any halt of any kind stopping the flow. Various analysis techniques help them manage quality to gather proper data. Alternative analysis, document analysis, process analysis, and Root cause analysis are the biggest processes that help the data analysis. The alternative analysis focuses on the identification of options that delves into the approaches that are appropriate to use. Document analysis focuses on the different documents produced for the project control process.

Process analysis identifies the opportunities for process improvements. It also sees the problems, constraints, and non-value added activities that occur during a process. And finally, root cause analysis is a technique that determines the reason that creates variance, risk, or defect.

Decision making #

Decision-making technique depends on evaluation of several criteria when discussing alternatives that can have both negative or positive influence on the project and product quality. The decision should evaluate the life cycle cost, schedule, stakeholder stratification, and risk about the project.

Data Representation #

Data needs to be represented in a careful manner so every little detail can be observed to make corrections at the right time. Mange quality uses various data representation techniques to record the data. Tools and techniques such as affinity diagrams, cause and effect diagrams, flowcharts, histograms, matrix diagrams, and scatter diagrams.

Audit #

It is a structured process that helps determine the project activity compliances with the organization and project policies, process, and overall procedures. Generally quality audits are conducted by an external team to the project.

Design for X #

Or known as DXF is a set of guidelines that can be applied during the design phase of the product for better optimization of specific aspects of the design. With proper implementation of DFX, it can raise the quality of a product’s final characteristics.

Problem-solving #

In the time of severe challenges that will make their way in the project, effective solutions have to be created to battle the problems. The creation of a proper solution will require the gathering of additional information, critical thinking, creative and quantitative logical approaches. The phases should go from defining the problem to verifying the solution’s effectiveness to test the answer.

Control Quality #

The only way to know if the project is running smoothly in the work field is by monitoring every tiny activity that goes on in the workplace. Control quality is the process that helps monitor and record the results of executing quality management activities in the project. This will help assess the performance and ensure the output matches the standards set by the stakeholders. The outputs need to meet the applicable standard, requirements, regulations, and specifications.

Different industries and project management styles will have different efforts to control quality and the extent of implementation in the organization. Some industries will implement far stricter quality control procedures compared to other industries. In agile projects, the team members will perform control quality activities through the project life cycle. While in more waterfall model projects, the quality control activities will be performed at a specific time and it always will be done towards the end of the project.

Tools and Techniques Control Quality #

This section will cover all the tools and techniques control quality uses to make the project quality management more productive.

Data gathering #

This process gets carried out by the implementation of checklists and check sheets. Checklists help in managing the control quality activities in a more structured manner, while check sheets will execute an effective collection of data and its potential quality problems.

Data analysis #

It is done through performance reviews and root cause analysis. RCA (ROOT CONTROL ANALYSIS) identifies the source of defects while performance reviews measures, compares, and analyses the quality matrix of the plan management process.

Inspection #

It is an examination of a work product to see if it fits the documented standards. All the inspections are generally performed through measurements. Both single activity and final product may get inspected through called reviews, peer reviews, audits, and walkthroughs.

Testing #

It is an investigation that gets conducted to provide objective inflation about the product quality service to see if it matches the project requirements.

Data representation #

This process gets down through cause and effect diagrams, control charts, histograms, scatter diagrams. So the data can be viewed more clearly in an accurate manner.

Meetings #

Control quality follows two different types of meetings: one is approved change request review and the other one is a retrospective lesson learned style. Approved change request review verifies the importation of all the parts in the project, then tested, completed, and certified. A retrospective is a form of the meeting held by the project team to discuss successful elements of a project, questions of improvement, data from the ongoing project to the future projects, and future additions.

Conclusion #

Quality management is important in the project’s outcome. The product needs to match the expectations of consumers, stakeholders, and the organization itself. Any sort of degradation, in reality, will backfire a lot to the company’s reputation. The placement of the quality management team will do an effective job in making sure the outcome of the project has everything that has been planned before the starting phases of the project timeline,