Develop a quality plan

- [Voiceover] During planning, you have to consider the quality that stakeholders want from the project's deliverables or final product. A quality management plan helps you ensure that your project meets the quality required. Project quality translates into meeting the customer's requirements and delivering on time and within budget. If your project includes deliverables or products, quality also means those products or deliverables conform to specifications.

A quality management plan is made up of three components. First, identify the quality standards for deliverables. For example, the quality for a product might include the acceptable tolerance for its dimensions or the acceptable number of defective products in a batch. For the conference center project, the quality standard for the network might be up time of 99.9% or higher. Keep in mind that the goal is to meet the quality standards you set.

Obviously, you don't want quality that's below standard. The customer won't be happy, might ask for additional work to deliver the right results or simply may refuse to pay. This might surprise you. You don't want quality that's higher than required because other aspects of the project can suffer, such as the schedule lengthening or costs expanding. The second part of the quality management plan is a quality assurance plan.

That is, how you will demonstrate that the quality standards have been met. For example, you might decide to spot test products coming off the production line to statistically determine the number of defective products in a batch. For the conference center, you can calculate the percentage of up time during a time frame, like one month. You can also plan your project to prevent defects in the first place. For example, you might opt for a simpler design that makes it easier to manufacture a product which reduces the number of defective products produced.

Finally, you plan for quality control. That is, how you will monitor and measure quality. Inspections go by a number of names, review, walk through and audit to name a few. The bottom line is that you examine or measure results to see if they meet the standards set. Continuous improvement is a big part of quality management. If you find quality issues, you also analyze the problems to see how to prevent them or at least reduce their frequency.

For example, cause and effect diagrams, also called fishbone diagrams because of their resemblance to a fish skeleton, help identify factors that could lead to problems. In turn, those factors can help you figure out ways to prevent the problems. Another quality tool is a pareto diagram which shows how many defects are generated by each cause. The diagram lists the causes by the number of defects they generate so you can address the causes that produce the most defects first.

By developing a quality management plan, you can ensure that your project meets its quality objectives.