Every project's end goal is to produce impressive products. For this reason, projects get subjected to thorough testing procedures in preparation for management, audits, market pressures and clients expectations. Quality control is one of the monitoring phases of a project that will set your product up for success and that's why you need to know how to create a Project Quality Management Plan to monitor and control the success of your project.
Unfortunately, many still seem to have problems getting it right. For this reason, we’ll be discussing some of the main factors to consider when creating a quality management plan for all of your future projects
Are you ready to impress management or your customers with great products and services?
Let’s dive in.
What Is a Quality Management Plan?
A quality management plan is one of the most integral components of project management. This plan ensures that all relevant procedures, policies, guidelines, and standards are per the organizational values and quality objectives.
In simpler terms, quality management ensures that all project deliverables will be of immense value to both the organization and customers. That’s why defining your process quality and product quality makes the most crucial initial steps in creating an effective plan.
Why Is a Quality Management Plan Important?
Here are some of the main benefits of creating an effective quality management plan:
- Solid process and product quality guidelines enhance overall production output.
- An effective quality management plan significantly reduces the margin for error.
- An all-inclusive quality management process creates more collaboration opportunities between project team members, stakeholders, and other departments.
- It strengthens and builds up your customer base and loyalty by ensuring that your products and services are notably superior.
Who Should Be Involved In Creating a Quality Management Plan?
As the epicenter of your project's lifeline, everyone involved in the projects needs to start by owning up to the set quality standards. Since not all organizational structures are cut from the same cloth, here are some of the must-include players are:
1. Quality test professional
Also known as the Tester, quality test professionals help identify specific quality concern details that the rest of the team might fail to pinpoint. Lobbying and including them in your team from the start is critical, especially when defining your quality acceptance criteria.
2. Project stakeholders
Project stakeholders usually play a vital role in your project's lifecycle. Involving them from the beginning inspires more collaboration opportunities, ensuring that the set quality standards are at par with organizational objectives.
What Should Be Included in Creating a Quality Management Plan?
Below are some of the main things (but not limited to) to include when creating your quality management plan:
- Your desired quality management strategy / approach
- List of deliverables and processes to be reviewed
- Quality requirements for the listed deliverables and processes
- Definition of roles and responsibilities for everyone involved
- Quality management measures
- Quality control framework
- Back-up plan for correcting defects
- Important definitions
It's always a good idea to benchmark with other prior projects and engage your project team in the process to weigh buy-in.
How to create a Project Quality Management Plan
Follow the below steps to create your quality management plan:
- Have a shared definition of what quality means for the project
- Divide and assign quality management responsibilities
- Determine your target state
- Write the acceptance criteria for the project
- Integrate functioning code tests made by your project development team
- Install a working deployment pipeline optimized for optional quality checks
- Set up an automated regression testing system for grating purposes
- Configure all of the above processes in the automation tool of your choice
What should a good project quality management plan entail?
- Quality planning methods
- Project specific definition of quality
- Project quality measurement protocols
- Quality assessment, review, & audit guidelines
- Project quality improvement procedures
- Quality monitoring and control strategies
- Corrective actions
- Quality schedule for the project
- Quality management roles and responsibilities
- Project quality management processes
- Quality management guidelines & procedures
- Quality management approaches, tools & techniques
How to Implement Quality Project Management
Here are some quick steps to help you implement your quality management plan:
- Make a project quality metric and management plan
- Set up a quality assurance plan for the project
- Configure a quality control framework for the project
- Use an automation tool to execute the process
Many project managers over look and don't spend the time or know how to create a project quality management plan and this will impact the time, quality and the cost of the overall project as all 3 of these project items impact each other. There are so many think to think of and to manage a project that why you need to document your project starting with your project management plan.