In a sense quality relates to all 3 parts of the triple constraint and is equally important to them. If a project is not performed on time, according to the specifications and within budget it is not considered successful. Project quality is about a project performing faster (time), cheaper (cost) and better (scope) than it is currently performing.A more formal quality definition is in PMI's PMBOK (Chapter 8):
Project Quality Management processes include all the activities of the performing organization that determine quality policies, objectives and responsibilities so that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken.
Note that quality might be defined differently by various quality leaders and organizations.
There are several formal quality systems
- Malcolm Baldrige National Quality
- ISO 9000:2000
- SEI's Capability Maturity Model
- Six Sigma
- Lean Sigma
- Deming Prize
One important note: Quality has a price! Make sure at the beginning of a project that all stakeholders have the same understanding of what quality they want to achieve. See also this link for more info on cost of quality and cost of non-conformance
Project Quality Management has 3 process steps
- Quality Planning
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
1. Quality Planning
What needs to happen during this step?
- Stakeholders need to be identified and prioritized
- Project Quality standards/expectations need to be identified and prioritized
S pecific
M easurable
A ttainable
R ealistic
T imed
Example: Quality Standard : Every hard disk of notebook xyz will work w/o any maintenance for 24 months or 15,000 hours
2. Quality Assurance
What is quality assurance? This activity describes who, what , when, where and how a quality standard
will be measured.
These activites must be measurable, relevant (meaning related to the quality standard), integrated in the
quality system and someone needs to be responsible to ensure the activities occur.
Some tools which can be used during this step: Gap Analysis, Flow Charts, SWOT Analysis
3. Quality Control
from PMBOK: ".. monitoring specific project results to determine whether they comply with relevant
quality standards and identifying ways to eliminate causes of unsatisfactory results"
To put this very simple: Is the customer satisfied with the quality? This is related to the requirements
and quality standards that were developed in step 1.
Some tools which can be used during this step: PDCA Cycle (plan, do, check, act) from Six Sigma
Histograms, Pareto Charts, Flow Charts, Cause-and-effect diagrams, scatter diagrams, run charts,
control charts
Summary: Quality Management is a HUGE topic and this is obviously only a very first glance at some of these areas.
Here some links that might help to delve deeper in this topic
Six Sigma
ISO 9000
Wikipedia - Quality Management
