From the course: Project Management Foundations

Develop a quality plan

From the course: Project Management Foundations

Develop a quality plan

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- [Instructor] Project success actually means meeting objectives, not exceeding them. Quality management includes processes to make sure that a project satisfies its objectives and requirements. A quality management plan is your roadmap to meeting objectives. Project quality translates into meeting the customer's requirements and delivering on time and within budget. With deliverables and products, quality also means conforming to specifications. A quality management plan has three components. First, there's the quality standards for deliverables. For a product, the quality standard might include the acceptable tolerance for its dimensions or the acceptable number of defective widgets in a batch. For the hospital scheduling project, one quality standard might be that the scheduling system meets all the required scheduling functions. Keep in mind that the goal is to meet the quality standards. Obviously, you don't want quality that's below standard. The customer won't be happy. They might ask for additional work to get it right or simply refuse to pay. This might surprise you. You don't want quality that's higher than required. Why? Because other aspects of the project can suffer, like a later finished date or higher cost. The second part of the quality management plan is a quality assurance plan. This spells out the processes you use during the project to ensure that the final results meet the quality standards. For the scheduling system, reviewing requirements and designs falls into this category. You might also test software functions as they're developed. Finally, you plan for quality control, which means how you measure and monitor quality in the final deliverables. The bottom line is that you examine or measure results to see if they meet the standard set. For the scheduling project, the final acceptance test would measure whether the processes and system achieve their objectives. For the hospital's new cancer wing, you would do a walkthrough to confirm that the construction has been completed correctly. Continuous improvement is a big part of quality management. If you find quality issues, you analyze the problems to see how to prevent them or at least reduce their frequency. Cause and effect diagrams are also called fish bone diagrams, because they look like a fish skeleton. They help identify factors that could lead to problems. Those factors can help you figure out ways to prevent the problems. Another tool is a Pareto diagram. This shows how many defects are generated by each cause. That way you can address the causes that produce the most defects first. By developing a quality management plan, you can ensure that your project meets its quality objectives. For practice, identify potential quality assurance processes and quality control measures for each of the project objectives.

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