Managing Project Quality as per PMI
Project Management Institute (PMI) is a global organisation for the project management profession; it is engaged in setting professional standards, conducting research and providing a wealth of information and resources with respect to project management. PMI helps practioners and organisations by sharing information on the good practices through the user community. According to PMI project quality management is a process that ensures that the project will satisfy the needs for which it is designed.
Project quality management is a continuous process that starts and ends with the commence and completion of the project. It is not a separate, individual process that happens at the end of an activity. It is a part of every project management unction that determines the quality policy, responsibilities and objectives. These are achieved by quality planning, quality control, quality assurance.
The project quality management processes are:
- Quality planning: This is the process of determining quality standards that are relevant to the project and identifying ways to achieve them.
- Quality assurance: This is the process of evaluating project performance on a regular basis to assure or provide confidence that the project satisfies the identified quality standards.
- Quality control: This process evaluates specific project results to determine if they comply with relevant quality standards.
- Quality improvement: Once perfect planning for the quality aspect of the project is done and all quality steps are implemented efficiently and effectively and appropriate measure taken to avoid quality issues, an improvement in the regular quality process is seen and in turn project quality improvement happens.
Project quality management must cater to quality needs of both the project management processes and the project outcome (product or service). If quality requirements are not met in either of these dimensions then the project objective may be lost and may lead to serious negative consequences. For example: Overworking the project team, to meet customer expectations may result in increased employee attrition. Errors may go undetected by rushing through planned quality inspections in order to meet project schedules.
Both project management and quality management have recognized the importance of the following:
- Customer satisfaction: It is to ensure customer expectations are meet by understanding and managing customer needs. The project outcome (product or service) must confirm to customer requirements and satisfy their needs.
- Prevention over inspection: During inspection, mistakes may be revealed. The cost of preventing mistakes is much lesser when compared to the cost of correcting mistakes.
- Continuous improvement: This is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. These efforts can seek incremental improvement over time or breakthrough improvement all at once. Processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility. The bases for quality improvement are the plan-do-check-act cycle which was defined by Shewhart and modified by Deming. In addition to this there are a number of quality improvement initiatives undertaken by the performing organisation, such as Total Quality Management and Six Sigma which aims at improving the quality of the project's management as well as the quality of the project's product. Malcolm Baldrige, Organisational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), and Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) are some of the process improvement models that cites to continuous improvement.
- Management responsibility: A project's success depends largely with the active participation of all team members; it is the responsibility of management to provide the resources needed to achieve it.