Step-by-Step Guide for Quality Management in Project Management
What Is Project Quality Management?
Quality Management is the process of managing and maintaining quality throughout a project. With so many misconceptions, many people think quality means perfection. The truth is there’s no such thing as perfect; what we can do is make things better than they were before.
The goal of quality management in project management is to meet the standards set by the higher-ups or the external customers. Project activities must be designed and executed considering these standards.
Different projects have different requirements for quality. It can depend on the teams and how much is expected. It will usually be the responsibility of the project managers, but in some cases, it could be the responsibility of quality assurance experts or quality experts.
What Does “Quality” in “Project Quality Management” Mean?
A remarkable definition of project quality comes from Joseph Juran, a management theorist who worked in Japan in the 1950s. He defined quality as “meeting or exceeding customer expectations”. In project quality management, the definition of quality is kept to what the stakeholder or customer expects from the project deliverables. Meeting these requirements means that the project will be considered successful.
A Useful Fact: The definition of quality is different depending on the person you ask. There’s no one definition for quality and it depends on various perspectives. For example, for some, “quality” means a certain standard of workmanship. But what if something is made well? Some define “quality” as the number or percentage of people or organizations that approve of the product.
Why Is Project Quality Management Important?
1. Earn and Maintain Customer Confidence
Have you ever been to a restaurant and loved the food and service so much that you want to go back again? It’s great when you see people who keep coming back to a restaurant, or to a particular brand because they know they’ll always get what they want.
Quality is at the core of such customer experiences.
Quality assurance is an important part of the project management process. When you do quality assurance, it shows your customers that you’re working hard to meet their standards. There’s no room for confusion or blame when they know you have a high-quality process in place.
2. Reduce the Chances of Project Failure and Rework
One of the benefits of project quality management is that you can minimize the chance of a project failing or being reworked by following set procedures from the beginning. Monitoring a project’s quality also helps you identify common problems and their causes. You can then take corrective actions on time to ensure that the project
3. Brings Consistent Improvement
Commit to improving the quality of your work. Make this a non-negotiable aspect of your work process by establishing a system and process that promotes quality. When you do, you’ll maximize your potential. Quality management helps you throughout the project phases, offering valuable feedback and suggesting what to do next. Keeping in contact with the project’s team throughout its completion will provide you with a more accurate picture of how the project is progressing.
4. Reduces Time and Cost on Future Projects
Project quality management is a process in which you strive to do the best job possible on each individual project that you work on and make sure that you are using the learning from previous projects, even if it means making mistakes. Over time, you’ll get better at avoiding mistakes and be more efficient about your work.
What Are the Different Phases in Project Quality Management?
Quality management is the process that combines Quality Planning, Quality Assurance, and Quality Control.
Let us understand in detail what exactly happens in these different phases.
1. Quality Planning
The first phase of project quality management is planning. When projects are planned well, they are less likely to fail. Have you heard the saying “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail?” This adage applies to project quality management as well. If a project’s goals are clearly defined and the stakeholders communicate them well, then the chances of the project being successful increase.
2. Quality Assurance
Once you have defined what quality means for your project, evaluate all of your tasks to ensure that they meet those criteria. Quality assurance is an integral part of a project’s life cycle and allows you to correct any issues before they become significant problems. Ensure that every task meets stringent quality standards in order to guarantee that the entire project is successful.
3. Quality Control
Quality control is the final step in the project quality management process. This phase involves monitoring activities to ensure that the deliverables are up to standards.
Assuming the quality administration process and the last expectations are not in arrangement with the quality assumptions, essential changes should be made to hold the undertaking back from coming up short.
Quality control in the project the board ought to in a perfect world be finished at each progression of the task. Doing it, finally, looks bad, as the deliverable is now prepared by then, at that point. At the point when Quality Control is executed during the interaction, it allows you the opportunity to make enhancements and changes right when they are required.
Let’s now dive in to understand what a project quality management plan entails.
What Is a Project Quality Management Plan?
A venture quality arrangement portrays the exercises, strategies, principles, and methodology expected for accomplishing top notch expectations that meet the undertaking objectives and partner assumptions.
To be appropriately kept up with and followed, the guidelines and methods expressed in the quality administration plan ought to be down to earth. They ought to be sensible enough for your group to follow them and accomplish the ideal quality outcomes.
Here’s how a project quality management plan is created:
Step 1:Ensure that the project has everything necessary to succeed. Include questions such as: What does success mean to the team and the stakeholders? What are the most important areas of the project and what can you do to ensure their quality? How would you measure their quality?
Also, keep in mind the unstated demands and requirements that are merely common sense.
Step 2: Create a quality checklist and inform your team about its importance.
Step 3: Assign tasks and delegate responsibilities to the team members. Track their performance by checking in with them on how they spend their time and how much progress they’ve made.
Step 4: We provide clients with a quality assurance test. We will also do our best to make sure the quality is consistent throughout the project.
One of the biggest mistakes project managers make is believing that once the plan is set, it cannot be changed. When executing the project, if you discover a better way of doing things, do not hesitate to modify the plan.
Top Tools for Project Quality Control
There are devices regularly utilized in quality administration to recognize entanglements and make process upgrades. Here are the seven devices that can assist you with evaluating the nature of your venture and further develop it when you have opportunity and willpower.
1. Flowcharts
A flowchart is a graphical portrayal that comprises of the various strides of a cycle or work process in a grouping. The outline preferably shows the different choice focuses, exercises, undertakings, and the request for steps expected to finish a specific objective. With a distinct flowchart, you can imagine the means and undertakings did to finish a cycle.
An unmistakable image of each and every progression of the interaction makes it simple for you to distinguish issues that you could experience and concoct the right arrangements on time.
In the event that one way or work process doesn’t prompt the ideal result, it is not difficult to make revisions, change the stream or dispense with pointless work steps to build efficiency and effectiveness. That is the magnificence of flowcharts.
2. Pareto Diagram
A Pareto diagram is a reference chart utilized significantly for critical thinking. The diagram helps you focus on and centre around the significant issues confronting project executives. With a Pareto Chart, your group can use their energy and time better and be at their useful best working.
When critical problems are prioritized, it gets easier to resolve them and take the project forward.
For instance, assume you get a ton of client grievances consistently, and there is an inward undertaking to classify grumblings and resolve them at the earliest.
Presently, you can separate information about the tickets and the times they are produced. Classify them and afterward utilize the information to prepare your Pareto Chart.
A Pareto Chart looks something like this:
- When executed accurately, a Pareto Diagram helps in the venture quality administration in the accompanying ways:
- It provides you with a visual portrayal of the data sources showed arranged by their significance.
- You can distinguish the most continuous grumblings or deformities.
- Empowers groups to zero in on the data sources that are liable for the most elevated influence.
- Permits you to investigate the cycle and make course restorative moves on time.
3. Checksheets
A Checksheet is quite possibly the most organized method for evaluating data sources, and processes and guaranteeing project quality. In this technique, you can accumulate subjective as well as quantitative information, dissect it deeply, and arrive at brilliant decisions about project quality.
With checksheets, you can catch the times a specific worth (event, occasion, deformity, issue, and so forth) shows up simultaneously. Influence this information to break down the interaction and think of convenient answers to guarantee great last expectations.
This is what a checksheet looks like.
Here are some major reasons companies trust checksheets for project quality management:
- Helps you record data in a consistent manner.
- Allows you to capture essential descriptive and contextual information, which is often missed in other methods.
- Provides data to create Histogram and Pareto Chart.
- Enables you to detect issues as they occur.
4. Cause and Effect Diagram
A circumstances and logical results outline, frequently called a fishbone graph is an extremely valuable quality device to recognize potential reasons for blemishes, imperfections, and disappointments. It is given this name in light of the fact that the graph closely resembles a fish’s skeleton. The issue or cause is shown at the top of the fish. The causes are displayed on the spine.
At the point when you separate the reasons for the issue in such a way, it turns out to be not difficult to detect bottlenecks and distinguish the main drivers that obstruct groups from accomplishing the ideal degree of task quality.
5. Scatter Diagram
Disperse Diagram, otherwise called a dissipate diagram or connection graph, is a basic quality check instrument that assists you with examining relations between two factors or two arrangements of information focuses that address circumstance and end results of a specific issue or occasion.
As straightforward as they might look, dissipate outlines assist you with arranging, controlling, and screening different quality issues in projects.
A superb illustration of a dissipate outline in project quality administration would examine the connection between project risk the board and the financial plan. Such a dispersed outline can assist you with evaluating what is ideal for the task and what isn’t inside the dispensed financial plan.
6. Control chart
A control outline is utilized to dissect how steady or temperamental a specific interaction is. It assists you with checking process execution and studying how an interaction changes after some time. You can involve it to distinguish varieties in information and make restorative moves when you track down irregularity in the outline.
As may be obvious, a controlled outline has a normal, upper control breaking point, and lower control limit distinguished in view of verifiable information or undertaking necessities. It is fundamentally used to check whether a dull cycle is creating brings about an OK reach.
Control outlines assume an essential part in refining the cycles to bring wanted results and hold quality control under wraps.
7. Gantt Charts
Present day project the board instruments offer Gantt Charts as a way to examine the advancement and nature of ventures, undertakings, and sub-errands. A Gantt Chart gives a visual portrayal of all undertaking exercises beginning to end. There is an advancement bar addressing every action, with its beginning and end dates, making it simple for you to survey its exhibition.
What more? Gantt Charts permit you to oversee undertakings, picture the advancement, and fulfill time constraints quicker, with the least problems.
Quality Management: Indispensable for Project Success
Since you have perceived how to characterize the undertaking prerequisites and quality rules, you should adhere to them persistently all through the venture.
Have an undertaking plan made after an intensive conversation with the clients or interior partners? Sit with your venture group, and foster a viable way to deal with overseeing quality according to the cycles and guidelines characterized in the diagram.
You can utilize project the board programming to design and execute projects proficiently while guaranteeing quality and controlling outcomes. The instrument helps delegate errands and screen how well the group follows the arrangement to measure up to the clients’ quality assumptions.
