Quality Management

The cost of quality is a significant cost on any project so prudent managers look for ways to keep these costs in check.

Reducing Your Cost of Quality

How high is your Cost of Quality? The answer might surprise you. Yes, it includes reviews, the QA infrastructure, and preparing tests, those are your "Appraisal Costs." But how high are your "Failure Costs" the cost of defects? Your engineers spend time in diagnosis and rework, development schedules slip, support costs climb, and your company's and products' reputations sink. These Failure Costs, which are the more significant Cost of Quality, are beyond your direct control. But you can gain control over them indirectly, by investing in Appraisal Costs that minimise Failure Costs, reducing your total Cost of Quality and making it more predictable.

Why PRINCE2's Approach to Quality is Flawed

PRINCE2 has many excellent ideas for project management, but I think its approach to quality is at best weak and at worst entirely inappropriate. My first gripe is that PRINCE2 redefines what the word quality usually means. My dictionary defines it as a "degree or standard of excellence, especially a high standard." If I've bought myself a quality car, I've probably purchased something like a Mercedes or Rolls Royce. PRINCE2's definition is something that is "fit for purpose" of satisfying stated needs. So for example, according to PRINCE my Landrover is a quality product. It's not luxurious but, as a keen skier, I can use it to haul equipment to the Alps each year. This re-definition of the word quality often confuses people, before they even look at the detail.

Deming's 14 Points and Quality Project Leadership

Organisational improvements can begin with anyone. While it's true that our professional domain as project managers is bounded by the project life cycle, our influence is often much greater than that, and quality management is one of those areas where skilled project managers are best suited to be instrumental change agents - first in the culture of their projects, and second, in the culture of their departments and organisations.

The Project Scorecard

Want to have your communications to your project sponsor and project stakeholders read every time out? Try using the "scorecard" approach. This article gives you pointers and advice on putting together a scorecard for your project that will be an attention grabber.

How Does Your Quality Management Assessment Method Stack Up?

Not all testing methodologies are created equal. On one hand for instance, there are informal assessment methods that serve as practice sessions in preparation for applying for compliance certificates. Then, there are formal testing methods that must meet the rigorous requirements that are set by the industry standard Testing Maturity Model Integration (TMMi) for two reasons, to earn a merit of approval and to be proven effective through the TMMi certification.

6 Success Factors for Managing Project Quality

Commentators have differing views on what constitutes a quality project. The generally agreed parameters are that it delivers the desired outcomes on time and within budget. Through our long experience, the Transformed team has identified 6 key factors that improve project quality.

Understanding Change in a Quality Culture

In any improvement process, managing the influence of change and the anti-change culture that will continually try to raise its head will be one of the most ardent tasks. Learn to deal with this as effectively as you do the project management itself. There are many well-written books on the subject of change in every category of change that you could imagine.

Quality Projects Take Time and Money

In project management, as with most things in life, quality is planned in, not inspected in. Quality, and the expectations for acceptance, must be defined up front. In English, when it comes to project management, quality is the ability of the project to meet all of the project scope requirements, and the implied needs of the project scope.

A Word (Or Two) On Quality

In the world of interactive project management the promise of quality has become cliché. Quality is sometimes seen as an incidental to each client delivery, as opposed to an independent, critical phase of the delivery. Because quality control is commonly compressed at the tail end of a project, the overall commitment to the calibre of work produced is inherently compromised. There is, however, one person that can change this negative trend - the project manager.