How to Maintain Project Quality?

2024-09-12

In project-based enterprises, the focus is often on project costs. However, over time, many companies have unconsciously equated high quality with high costs.

No matter how well an enterprise uses project management tools or meets milestones within budget, if the delivered product fails to meet quality standards, it all amounts to nothing. This is why project quality management is so crucial. In essence, the cost of quality is the price we pay. Managing and maintaining project quality is an issue that modern managers must prioritize.


How to Maintain Project Quality?

1. Develop a Project Quality Management Plan  
Planning project quality management involves identifying the quality standards for the project and its deliverables, and preparing strategies to ensure these standards are met. This process provides guidance on managing and confirming quality throughout the project. It typically includes the following:

- Roles and responsibilities for quality management
- When and how the team will measure quality
- What needs to be inspected and tested
- How to verify deliverables

2. Implement Project Quality Control  
From the start of the project to its completion, quality control is carried out according to the quality management plan. Quality control involves detecting issues, evaluating them, addressing problems, and confirming the results.

3. Continuously Improve Project Quality Management  
Continuous improvement in quality management is an ongoing process. Quality management doesnt have a definitive endpoint—its an evolving task that always remains in progress.

How to Use System Software for Management

Utilizing specialized project management systems like 8Manage PM can help effectively measure project quality standards and control the deliverables. This software offers comprehensive and rigorous quality evaluation features, helping project managers set measurable quality benchmarks, assess quality deviations, and manage the quality of final deliverables. Specific features include:

- Quality Planning  
The 8Manage PM system allows you to clearly define what each deliverable should achieve, the metrics for measurement, who is qualified to review the deliverables, and the steps to take if a deliverable fails. Addressing these questions helps you set quality requirements for each deliverable.

The system also supports scheduling quality review meetings and automatically tracks meeting outcomes.

- Quality Assurance  
8Manage PM provides stakeholders with evidence that all quality-related activities are being carried out as planned and promised. It ensures that safeguards are in place to meet all quality expectations.

The system conducts quality assurance for the products and services being delivered, as well as the processes and procedures used to manage the project. It also allows for the development and tracking of quality assurance tests. Using matrices, it can determine whether the quality management plan is being followed acceptably. By leveraging both qualitative and quantitative metrics, project quality and customer satisfaction can be effectively measured. These tests or quality audits help businesses predict and verify whether goals are being met and determine if corrective actions are necessary.

- Quality Control  
8Manage PM offers workflows to ensure quality standards, including identifying, analyzing, and correcting issues. While quality assurance is proactive and occurs before problems arise, quality control addresses problems after they are identified and offers solutions for improvement.

The software helps managers monitor project outputs to ensure they meet applicable standards. It also identifies project risk factors and mitigation strategies while seeking ways to prevent and eliminate unsatisfactory performance. Quality control ensures that the project stays within both budget and schedule.

Through deliverable reviews and acceptance tests within the 8Manage PM system, project outputs can be closely monitored. By capturing deliverables that consistently fail to meet agreed-upon standards, project direction can be adjusted without needing to redo entire sections.