Hello fellow project managers, business analysts and stakeholders! Welcome to my blog! I am excited to share an important topic with you on managing quality is critical and how to maintain consistent quality within project delivery. Hope you find this post insightful!
As project managers, it is important to make sure that you focus on the triple constraints when leading and delivering a project. The triple constraint focuses on budget, schedule and scope as the primary areas that the project manager should address and stay attuned to. While these areas are definitely important for the project manager to focus on, the project manager also need to make sure that the quality of the work being delivered is consistent and meets the client’s expectations. As quality is a crucial component of project management, it is important to understand why it matters. If a project manager only focused on scope, schedule and budget, they could direct the team to implement a solution or product within those constraints, but the product might be useless if the consumers or end users can not properly utilize the software/solution.
In these cases, managing quality is one of the key pillars of project management. Without a focus on quality, the project has no purpose of existing in the first place. Quality management matters because it is the driving force of whether the final product/deliverable/solution meets the requirements and expectations of the project stakeholders. With that being said, below are some focus areas on how a project manager can increase and deliver with a consistent level of quality across the project team:
- Develop and implement a quality management plan. What is a quality management plan and why is it important? A quality management plan allows for a project manager to define and follow the set of standard processes around managing the quality of projects based on the terms and stipulations defined by the client/project stakeholders. A quality management plan can focus on a few different areas of how to focus on and address quality within the project, including, how quality is measured, the roles and responsibilities of those who will be managing project quality, tools/methods that are being utilized to manage and assess quality, quality checklists, and tracking quality metrics throughout the duration of the project. We could have an entirely separate article on how to generate and implement a quality management plan, but this is the essence of why a quality management plan is important.
- Commit to quality deliverables with the tone at the top. The project team will only focus on quality when the tone comes from the top of the team and project leadership. When the leadership (including project management) says that quality matters and that there is a consistent way to evaluate quality within the project, all project stakeholders and team members will focus attention on quality to make sure the deliverables and solutions produced meet the expectations of what the client is seeking.
- Conduct quality control of the deliverables. As part of creating the quality management plan and implementing it, it is important to conduct quality control activities within the project. This can include regularly reviewing project deliverables, assessing the quality of the work produced by the project team members, and checking across workstreams on how they are addressing risks and issues that arise in the project.
- Check in with stakeholders. Checking in with the client is another way to assess the quality of the project delivery. By having regular check ins with the key stakeholders, as a project manager, you will receive additional insights on how the project team is doing with the various project deliverables and activities. Stakeholders typically are not shy in providing feedback on the quality of work being performed, especially when its their own division/department’s money at stake.
- Document and discuss lessons learned from each phase of the project. Another way to control the quality of the work within the project is by conducting lessons learned with the project team on a phase by phase basis (or sprint by sprint basis if you are running an agile project). By documenting and discussing lessons learned, it will enable the project team to be involved in the process of self-reflection to understand what went well, what did not go well in terms of quality, and then determining how they can improve on these areas in the next phase or sprint.
- Measure and document quality performance indicators. There are several key performance indicators that can be considered when measuring quality. Quality can be measured by the count/severity/types of risks, count/severity/types of issues, customer satisfaction and reviews based on existing product in the market, defect log metrics, financial metrics, quality audit findings metrics based on quality audit check list and many more. These performance indicators can give the project manager a sense of where the current situation stands in terms of quality within a project. If there are more issues/concerns coming into the risks/issues report, then the project manager may want to investigate further to see how quality of work may be impacting the delivery of the product.
Quality management plays an important role in determining the success or the failure of a project. Without good quality management strategies and approaches, a project can miss the mark in terms of meeting stakeholder expectations. Based on the above, there are several tactics and options available to project managers to enable the team to maintain a higher level of focus in terms of delivering quality work.
I hope you enjoyed this post! How do you motivate your team to focus on quality? Leave us a comment below!