Does Your Project Need a Quality Process or Quality Activities?

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.

Large projects need a formal quality process

Large projects 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.
• 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.  

Small projects rely on individual quality activities

Smaller projects cannot implement such formal quality management processes. The time it would take to set up the formal processes and metrics might take longer than the project itself. For a small project, specific activities might include:

• Using pre-existing templates and checklists to manage work
• Performing walkthroughs and inspections on deliverable components
• Rigorous reviews of draft copies of documents

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.