Project Quality Management

Quality processes should be used on all types of projects. As part of project triangle, project should be completed within time and cost, while maintaining high quality is very important for the successful outcome of the project. Worldwide competition has also resulted in a stronger emphasis on quality. If quality requirements are not met, it could lead to negative impact to both the customer and the company building the product or providing the service. The approach used to ensure quality can differ a lot between projects. For example, when developing a software there are other procedures then when developing a drug. To ensure quality satisfaction for the customer some Quality Management processes must be implemented. The quality management system consist of quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control. In this article we will look at how quality is defined and what are the best practices for managing quality to satisfy the customer and to meet quality standards.

What is quality?

There is no single definition of quality, depending on who is asked quality can mean different things. The ISO definition for quality is “The quality of an organisations’ products and services is determined by the ability to satisfy customers and the intended and unintended impact on relevant interested parties.” and “ The quality of products and services includes not only their intended function and performance, but also their perceived value and benefit to the customer”(ISO 9000:2015(E)).

Quality can also mean (Handbook of Project Management. page 124):

• Relative quality - the product or service compared to other products or services.
• Fitness for use - the product or service is able to be used.
• Fitness for purpose - the product or service will meet its intended purpose.
• Meets requirements - the product or service in relation to the customer’s requirements.
• Quality is inherent - quality cannot be tested in. The process must support designing in quality, not attempting to test it in at the end of the process.

The lack of definition on this term causes troubles for the project manager, if they can’t describe precisely what quality improvements they are aiming for it will be difficult to implement quality improvement objectives.

Quality assurance

 Continuos process improvements 

Quality control

   A cause and effect diagram
   Pareto charts
   Inspections
   Statistical sampling?