18th May, 2011.
Quality management requires an investment of time and resources with the belief that your project and your deliverables will be of higher quality in the future. This higher quality, in turn, will lead to less rework and a more satisfied client. The basic value proposition for quality management is that you will save more cost and time over the life of your project (and life of the resulting products) than the cost and time required to set up and manage the quality management process.
Let’s look at that value proposition in a little more detail because there is a flip side as well. Like most project management processes, the time and effort you invest in quality management must be appropriate for the size of project you are undertaking. Therefore, the quality process that you implemented on your long projects probably would not be appropriate on the smaller ones. If you implement too elaborate a quality process on smaller projects, it may well be that the cost and time required will not be offset by overall cost and time savings. In general, this is not a good situation and is not a good use of project resources.
Large projects need a formal quality process
Large projects typically have more that can go wrong in terms of the quality of their deliverables. They also have larger teams and more complexity in terms of how the project is executed. Quality management is not only helpful for large projects – it is required. On a large project, the quality management process can consist of:
Awareness and training.You can invest the time to make sure your team understands the importance of quality and what their role is in making sure that quality results are produced.
Quality Management Plan.The project team can develop a specific Quality Management Plan that describes the quality assurance and quality control processes that will be followed. In many cases, large projects include specific full-time or part-time resource(s) to manage the quality process.
Metrics capture.You need good data to show the overall quality of your processes and the products you are delivering. Identifying and capturing metrics gives you the information you need.
Process improvement. Analyzing the results of the metrics gives you the information you need to change and improve your processes in order to improve the overall quality of the deliverables you are producing on the project. This information can be used to update and improve your Quality Management Plan. The capturing of subsequent metrics will point out whether your changes are resulting in process and product improvements.
Small projects rely on individual quality activities
Smaller projects cannot implement such formal quality management processes because they do not have time to get through the metrics collection and process improvement steps. If your project is three months long, you may not be able to collect product related metrics until halfway through the project. If you collect metrics at that point, you have very little time to make process changes and then collect another set of metrics to see whether you improved or not. If you do, the project will be over.
That does not mean you give up on quality management. However, your overall process will be much simpler. You probably will not have a formal Quality Management Plan, but instead you will build quality activities directly into the schedule at appropriate points. For a small project, specific activities might include:
Discussing the importance of quality at team status meetings
Using pre-existing templates and checklists to manage certain aspects of work
Performing walkthroughs and inspections on deliverable components as they are built
Rigorous reviews of draft copies of documents
Rigorous testing, if appropriate for your project
Of course, all of these types of activities could also be a part of a larger Quality Management Plan. However, with smaller projects, the quality steps are usually seen as individual activities rather than in the context of a larger overall quality initiative.
Summary
Many of the same project management techniques that work well on a larger project cannot be implemented on smaller projects. Quality management processes must be scaled to the size of the project. In general, larger projects should have a formal Quality Plan and quality management process. Smaller projects can get by with identifying specific quality activities. Remember that there is a cost to managing quality, as well as a benefit. The effort and time required to manage quality must not exceed the overall value that you expect to gain from the process. |
