Today on Project Management Guide we are going to look at quality. In a project, quality has an important and specific role. So, for those beginning project management, what do we need to know?

As we have learned, a project exists to produce certain outputs, and part of the process of gathering requirements for what those outputs are must include information about what counts as an acceptable level of quality.

It is an understandable desire to only ever produce outputs of the highest quality. However, this level of quality is likely to take a lot of time, money, and effort. We don’t need our outputs to be the best, but late and expensive, we need them to be good enough, and on time and on budget.

So how do we go about making sure what we produce is of an acceptable quality? Well, you’ll remember from our post on project plans that one of the areas we need to cover in the plan is quality criteria.

What this means is that at the time of creating the project plan you will have agreed what criteria the output needs to meet, and how this will be measured. This will have been agreed with, at a minimum, the Executive and a representative of the end user, and hopefully with a representative of the people doing the work too!

Remember, quality criteria can be influenced by many things. Your business, or your customer’s, may have specific quality systems in place. Certain recognised standards of quality, such as ISO standards, may be mandated by contract. And, of course, the final use of the output will dictate what is needed – the quality required of a component in a washing machine is significantly different from an equivalent component in a nuclear submarine!

Now, these criteria, once agreed, tell you what success is, what completion of the project is. They need to be SMART:

• Specific – Clearly defined and precise
• Measurable – e.g. not “new computers”, but “computers with 2Gb of memory”, etc.
• Attainable – Don’t ask for the impossible
• Relevant – Is the criterion actually related to the aim of the project?
• Time-based – Enough time to achieve this. There is no point expecting a year’s worth of work in one week!

You will also need to decide who has the final say over the quality of the outputs. Hopefully your work on defining the quality criteria will mean there are no arguments over the quality (i.e. no qualitative judgements, only quantitative).

But quality isn’t something that you worry about only at the end of the project. The quality of what you are producing should be monitored throughout the project. Intermediate steps on the way to the final output, or separate, discrete pieces of that output should be quality checked as the project is carried out.

That’s a very quick overview of quality in a project. What tips do you have about quality in a project? How do you make sure you’re meeting the customer’s expectations, while also meeting your business needs? Let me know!