Use These Three Techniques to Improve Quality

Product quality does not need to be subject to chance. There are ways to ensure that your projects deliver high-quality products on a consistent basis. Here are three things to keep in mind.

Stress That Quality is Everyone's Responsibility

The project manager has overall responsibility for the quality management process.  However, project quality is really everyone's responsibility. All of the team, including the customer, has a stake in ensuring that the deliverables produced are of high quality. The entire team needs to take ownership of their own work and ensure it is of high quality.  Everyone is also responsible for surfacing ideas for improvement to the processes used to create the deliverables.

Make Sure Quality is a Mindset, Not an Event

On some projects, quality is seen as a particular step in the process, or perhaps a series of activities at the end of the process. However, to be effective, the team needs to adopt a continuous quality mindset. The team members need to take ownership of the deliverables that they produce and ensure that the deliverables are built with quality when they are first created. They also must not get defensive when others review their work. Team members must realize that a quality process allows the entire project team to produce quality deliverables with a minimal amount of errors and rework.

Project quality starts with planning but the execution of quality must be carried out throughout the project. A multifaceted approach to quality will include the following items: 

• Establishing a Quality Management Plan early in the project

• Building quality into the team (training, communication …)

• Building quality into the work processes (analysis, design, …)

• Building quality into project management deliverables

• Building quality into project deliverables

This multi-faceted and ongoing approach is the best way to build quality deliverables on a consistent basis.

Use quality control to validate the level of quality

It is true that everyone is responsible for quality. However, quality cannot be assumed. It must be validated. This is the purpose of quality control (also referred to as inspection). Quality control activities are focused on the overall quality of the deliverable being produced. Depending on the type of project, the following activities are examples of quality control activities.

• Deliverable reviews / peer reviews / technical reviews

• Checklists to ensure that deliverables are consistent and contain all the necessary information.

• Standards to ensure consistency

• Inspection of third-party materials and deliverables

• Product measurements and comparison to targets

• Structured methods to ensure standard, proven processes are used

• Testing of IT solutions

Everyone on the team needs a quality mindset. The team needs good quality processes. The team also needs to validate that the products do meet quality expectations. This will result in high quality work on a consistent basis.