Quality management

Overview

Quality management is an element of an organisations project management system with a focus on:

• customer satisfaction
• prevention of defects over inspection and
• continuous improvement.

Effective quality management is accomplished by ensuring that:

• all areas affecting product quality are identified and defined and
• adequate plans and procedures are implemented to measure and ensure compliance with baselined requirements.

Key activities

• Quality management planning – The Quality management plan is developed, defining the quality needs of the project and the approach for quality management.
• Conduct quality assurance (QA) – QA activities ensure quality in the processes by which products are developed. Audits and reviews are conducted against quality metrics.
• Conduct quality control (QC) – QC activities focuses on identifying defects in the actual products produced. It aims to identify and correct defects in the finished product in a reactive manner by measuring specific results against standards.
• Continuous improvement – An ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. Processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility. Corrective and preventative actions and lessons learned are associated with continuous improvement.
• Quality monitoring and reporting – QA tools and techniques (e.g. metrics, audit and review outcomes results,) produce quality records which provide information for quality reporting.

Key outputs

• Quality management plan.
• Quality register.
• Quality reports.
• Corrective and preventative actions.
• Lessons learned.