The overall purpose of project quality management aims to provide a broad framework for identifying quality standards and requirements, implementing quality assurance and control activities, and taking corrective actions for project improvement. Such a framework helps ensure successful project execution, in line with the customer’s needs, product specifications and quality expectations.
The people involved in managing the framework (key stakeholders, the project manager and the team) take care of managing documents, templates, schedules, plans and other quality management tools to make sure that the project deliverables are produced according to the implementation methodology and the expected quality levels.
The project quality management framework includes the following 3 components:
- Project Quality Planning. The first component is about creating a detailed plan that specifies activities for identifying quality requirements and standards for the project/product, and documenting how the project fits into the expected quality levels.
- Quality Assurance Activities. These activities are intended for ensuring that appropriate guidelines, approaches, requirements and procedures for managing project quality are implemented as planned and that the quality team works within expected performance levels. The quality assurance activities are managed under the rules and standards documented in a quality assurance plan template approved by the project manager. This document makes a foundation for ensuring that the team strictly adheres to the implementation framework.
- Quality Control Activities. These activities are designated to ensuring that project quality is measured and monitored against the quality baseline and that any defects, deviations and failures are indentified and effective decisions are made for implementing resolutions. Quality control includes issue tracking & testing activities. It becomes vital to successful risk management. The key goal of planning quality control activities is to ensure that the project results comply with the customer’s needs and quality expectations.
The Project Quality Management Framework section of the Project Implementation Guide is dedicated to describing the three components to help project managers, quality teams and stakeholders with setting up quality requirements, managing control procedures, monitoring quality levels, taking corrective actions and implementing improvements. The section includes the following articles: