Output of quality planning process
Quality management plan is one of the major outputs of quality planning. It describes how the project management team will implement the quality process. According to ISO 9000, it should describe the project quality system which includes the organisational structure, responsibilities, procedures, processes, and resources required to implement quality management.
A quality management plan defines the quality threshold. Quality management plan applies to project deliverables and project work processes. It provides input to the overall project plan and must address quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement for the project.
Although the entire quality requirements are not clear when the quality management plan is being developed, we need to describe the processes and techniques that will be used to uncover the quality requirements and help in ensuring that all the quality requirements are met. The following are the information included in the quality plan:
- Roles and responsibility: This lists the various quality related roles on the project and the set of quality activities for which the players would be responsible. The various quality related roles are quality auditors, third- party testing specialists, and inspectors and so on.
- Completeness and correctness criteria: The team has to directly work with the clients and understand the client's perspective of completeness and correctness and document them as part of the quality management plan.
- Quality requirement process: This describes the processes that will be used to ensure customer's quality expectations are properly captured and met.
- Quality assurance activities: This describes the major quality assurance activities and techniques that will be implemented on the project.
- Quality control activities: This describes the major quality control activities and techniques that will be used on the project.
- Quality standards: This lists all quality standards that the company has previously followed and is applicable to the current project.
- Quality tools: Lists any quality related tools the project will utilize.
The other outputs of quality planning process are:
- Quality metrics: This is an operational definition that describes, in very specific terms, a project or product attribute and how the quality control process will measure it.
- Quality checklist: A checklist is a structured tool, used to verify if a set of required steps have been performed. These are also used in quality control process.
- Process improvement plan: This details the steps for analysing processes to identify activities which enhance their value. The areas to be considered are:
- Process boundaries: Describes the purpose of processes, their beginning and end, their inputs/outputs, the data required, the owner, and the stakeholders.
- Process configuration: This is a graphic depiction of processes, with interfaces identified and used to facilitate analysis.
- Process metrics: Along with control limits, these metrics allow analysis of process efficiency.
- Targets for improved performance: These guide the process improvement activities.
- Project document updates: Project documents that may be updated include stakeholder registry and responsibility assignment matrix which describes the participation by various roles in completing tasks or deliverables for a project or business process.