Creating Quality Assurance

Project Quality – Part 4 – Creating Quality Assurance

by Brad Egeland

Wikipedia defines quality assurance as the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various aspects of a project, service or facility to maximize the probability that minimum standards of quality are being attained by the production process.

In project management terms, quality assurance, or QA, is the sum of the planning and the implementations of the plans the project manager, the project team, and management does to ensure the project meets the demands of quality. The project manager must ensure that the proper QA processes and tasks are built into the project schedule using a PM software tool and viewer like Seavus’ Project Viewer.  Keep in mind that quality assurance is not something that is done only at the end of the project, but before and during the project.

In some organizations, the Quality Assurance department or another entity will complete the QA activities. Quality assurance is interested in finding the defects and then fixing the problems. There are many different approaches to quality assurance, depending on the quality system the organization or project team has adapted. There are really just two general types of quality assurance:

• Internal QA. Assurance provided to management and the project team
• External QA. Assurance provide to the external customers of the project

Preparing for Quality Assurance

There are three inputs the project manager and the project team will need to prepare for QA:

• The quality management plan. This plan defines how the project team will implement and fulfill the quality policy of the performing organization.
• Results of quality control measurements. Quality control tests will provide these measurements. The values must be quantifiable so results may be measured, compared, and analyzed. In other words, “pretty close to on track” is not adequate; “95 percent pass rate” is more acceptable.
• Operational definitions. The metrics that define the project processes, their attributes, and units of measure are needed for QA.

Applying Quality Assurance

The QA department, management, or in some instances, even the project manager can complete the requirements for QA. Quality assurance can be accomplished using the same tools used for project planning:

• Benefit cost analysis
• Benchmarking
• Flowcharting
• Design of experiments
• Cost of quality

Completing a Quality Audit

Quality audits are about learning. The idea of a quality audit is to identify the lessons learned on the current project to determine how to make things better for this project – and other projects within the organization. The idea is that one project manager can learn from the implementations of another project manager and vice versa.

Quality audits are formal reviews of what’s been completed within a project, what’s worked, and what didn’t work. The end result of the audit is to improve performance for the current project, other projects, or the entire organization.

Quality audits can be scheduled at key intervals within a project or they can come without warning, depending on your organization’s own internal policies or possibly the requirements of whatever contract you might be working on (i.e., government contract). And the audit process can vary depending on who is completing the audit: internal auditors or hired, third party experts.

Improving the Project

The lone output of quality assurance is quality improvement.

Quality improvement requires action to improve the project’s effectiveness. The actions to improve the effectiveness may have to be routed through the change control system, which means change requests, analysis of the costs and risks, and involvement from the Change Control Board – if one exists in your organization or on your program or project.

Information or this article was derived, in part, from Phillips’ book entitled, “PMP Project Management Professional Study Guide.”