Quality over Quantity: Defining Project Quality Management

Luc Nguyen

Oct 22, 2023

5 min read

By: Luc Nguyen

You might have heard the concept of "quality over quantity." It talks about how it's better to put more effort into the quality of something rather than making a huge quantity of something. Well, let me tell you that as a project manager, you should implement this principle and you should practice project quality management. With project quality management, you'll be able to make sure good quality projects will be created and that both stakeholders and development teams will be satisfied and content.

Some groups define project quality management as the process to maintain and manage quality throughout a projects. Other groups define it as quantifying quality standards for the parameters of a project, to ensure that the standards are met. Many groups can have different definitions of it that can make it difficult to truly define it. But one thing is certain: project quality management will ensure that the project will satisfy any needs placed on it from either the stakeholders, development team, or both.

There are three main processes that are involved when implementing project quality management:

Planning Quality Management

Planning should be a no-brainer as the first step to anything. Without planning, you won't have a vision on how to get from point A to point B. Planning will ensure all the necessary actions and standards followed that the project can follow. It can also foresee any situations that may arise during the development of the project. There are many tools you can utilize during the planning stage. One technique, known as design of experiments, allows you to identify the variables that will have the most influence within a process. This can be very important for quality planning. It can allow you to experiment with these values to help you find your best "bang for your buck." This can also help with tackling issues such as cost and trade-off so that you can find the best combination that best fits the project. Communication is also important between the development team and the stakeholders. The development team may need experienced developers for the project. Stakeholders might be wanting something specific to be accomplished. Without communication, you wouldn't know what standards or requirements need to be met. When looking into IT projects, there are four aspects that can affect the quality of the project:

Functionality: how can the intended system fulfil it's required function. Features is something also to bring up here, which would be the characteristics that pop out to the user. You should always point out what functions and features a system may have, breaking down the components of the system.

Systems Outputs: Anything the system can create and display to the user. Examples of this would be reports, pop-ups and windows. Defining the layout of a system will allow the team to see if the user can understand all the information being currently displayed to them.

Performance: This measures how much the intended system can cater to the user's needs. A high quality system will ensure high performance for the user. This might mean you need to obtain faster hardware or software to keep up with the system and the stakeholder's requirements.

Reliability: How much the system can be reused after an intended amount of times. This can be crucial to factor as it can affect the cost of the system over time. Producing a high quality system may be reliable to use for a long time while a low quality system won't have the same reliability and may require updates and revisions.

Maintainability: Similar to reliability, this focuses on maintenance for the intended system. Reliability may not always be one hundred percent but implementing support systems can help with the longevity of the project. Some of these support systems can include customer support, tech support or a forum that can allow users to reach out for any potential issues or bugs to pop up.

Managing Quality

Maintaining quality will ensure high quality projects will have longevity. Quality assurance is the principle that describes the actions taken in order to meet the standards of the project. Quality assurance is very important to teams to the point that separate departments are created to ensure quality assurance is maintained. One tool that can be used for quality assurance would be benchmarking, which allows you to create ideas that can improve the quality of the project by using previous metrics. Another tool than can be used would be a quality audit, which is a structured review of the project activities than further improve current or future projects.

Controlling Quality

Before you can maintain quality, you need to be able to control it. The common goal of controlling quality would be to improve the quality itself, but this step has three outcomes created:

Acceptance Decisions: This is deciding when any part of the project will actually be integrated into the project. If they are accepted, they will be labeled as validated deliverables. If they are rejected, revision will be required.

Rework: This is the process where rejected ideas or services are reshaped into satisfying the project requirements. Rework may consume majority of the team's resources, so make sure the quality planning and quality assurance are done precisely to avoid rework.

Process Adjustments: This process corrects or prevents any future quality problems. It is based on the quality control measurements that may cause updates or changes to happen to the project.

There are many other tools that you can use to ensure quality control. There is something called the Seven Basic Tools of Quality that can be applied to projects. Here are some of these tools that may benefit you the most for quality control:

Cause and Effect Diagrams

Cause and Effect Diagrams can show the relationship between effects and causes. Why does something happen? Was this the intended output of this aspect? These are something of the questions that can be answered by using cause and effect diagrams.

*Example of a cause/effect diagram for why users can't log into their system

Flow Chart

Flow charts depict the flow of the project, displaying the logic behind specific components of the system. This can allow critiques to be identified and show points that need improvement within the system. It can also allow viewers to see the linearization of a system displayed.

*Example of a Flow Chart

Checksheet

This is used to collect and analyze data for the project. It can be considered as a data collection method that allows you to track the progress or components of your system. It can promote innovation as well as discussion between the develop team and the stakeholders.