Project Quality Plan

Quality is meeting or exceeding expectations of stakeholders. Quality is of paramount significance to the customer. Hence it is most important to ensure that the final deliverables from the project are quality deliverables. All the deliverables must meet the expected and stated standards and requirements, initially set out at the beginning of the project. Quality management is all about managing the quality of the project deliverables throughout the project lifecycle on a continuous basis.

Quality management is achieved through quality control and quality assurance activities. For that we need to develop a quality management plan. Project quality management plan will identify the relevant quality standards and requirements which the project deliverables need to fulfil and devising a plan for how to meet these requirements.

Project quality is not only the quality of the final deliverables, but also the quality of the processes those will be used to develop the product. It is about delivering a defect free product developed with maximum efficiency. Quality management plan will address both how to make a defect free product and also using the processes most efficiently.

We are listing below the suggested information to be captured in a quality management plan. The project quality plan should:

• Describe the project objectives and the quality expectations.
• Identify the organisation’s quality policies (for example, if they are ISO 9001 certified) and describe how these policies will apply to the project.
• Identify other quality criteria or policies that may need to be followed, such as the requirements of clients or investors.
• Describe how quality requirements will percolate down through the procurement and supply chain.
• Define the acceptance criteria for the project deliverables
• Define quality management roles and responsibilities.
• Identify the standards that will apply.
• Identify and list the quality metrics those need to be tracked.
• Describe monitoring and reporting procedures and the process for delivering continuous improvement.
• Describe the design and review procedures
• Describe the development procedures and processes
• Describe the testing and quality assurance procedures
• Describe procedures for dealing with defects.
• Describe the project acceptance processes and procedures
• Describe the quality audit procedures and plan
• Describe document control procedures.
• Describe change control procedures.
• Set out any quality training requirements.

While developing the quality management plan with above information, we need not duplicate any information. Any of the above information, if already defined, then we can use them with reference.

Conclusion

Quality Management plan is an integral part of the overall project management plan. It describes the project quality objectives clearly and lays down the detailed procedure for how to achieve and fulfil the quality objective of the project.