Defining project quality

- In our day-to-day lives, we generally think of quality as some sort of subjective opinion. It's fine for each of us to have different ideas about what quality means when it comes to things like food and cars and clothing. But when it comes to project management, it helps if we have a shared understanding of quality. There are five approaches that we often use to get agreement from stakeholders about the aspects of quality that are important for a project. First is validation which measures how well a project meets the needs of your stakeholders. In other words, it answers the question, are we running the right project? Second is verification which measures how well a project aligns to the requirements. In other words it answers the question, are we executing the project correctly? Third is precision which measures how consistently something works. It answers the question, how well can we predict what the result of an action will be? Fourth is accuracy which measures how close a result comes to your desired target. In other words, how close have we come to achieving our goal? And fifth is tolerance, which measures whether a result falls into an acceptable range. It answers the question, are we doing well enough? You can apply these five measurements of quality to lots of different goals and requirements but let me show you exactly how they work with a simple example. Let's say that we need to bake 100 cookies. Validation would tell us whether our customers liked them. Verification would tell whether we followed the recipe. Precision would tell how similar the cookies were to one another, accuracy would measure how many of the cookies turned out the way we expected and tolerance would tell us how many of the cookies were acceptable. They're all slightly different but each of those measures could be useful in deciding whether our cookie making project was successful. It's true that quality can mean different things to different people. So by deciding how we'll measure quality in our projects, we can make it easier to identify opportunities for improvement and to get our stakeholders on board to support those efforts.