Your Project Management Coach: Best Practices for Managing Projects in the Real World

Chapter 9

Planning for Quality

As you plan and execute your project, often what's topmost in your mind are the schedule and the cost. But quality is also a huge factor in making a project successful. So in addition to constantly monitoring and answering the questions “When?” and “How much?” quality demands that you answer the question “How well?”

Managing quality in a project has to do with ensuring that the product, service, or other project result meets the standards specified in the scope statement or requirements document. Project quality management emphasizes customer satisfaction, prevention of quality problems, continuous improvement, and management responsibility.

During project planning, you create the quality management plan that defines how you will implement quality standards. When you move on to project execution, your team performs quality assurance, ensuring that quality is built into the project results and that defects are prevented every step along the way. As part of project monitoring and controlling, quality control efforts include testing and inspecting the results and making sure they're within established specifications.

This chapter covers how quality is defined, implemented, and validated in a project. You get an overview of some of the most widely used quality standards and methodologies. You learn how to develop the quality plan for your project, and see how to use quality assurance and quality control techniques to ensure that your customer's quality ...