PRINCE2 Techniques for Quality Management
PRINCE2 has a nifty three-step quality management technique that revolves around planning quality, controlling quality, and accepting products. It’s all about focusing on products, as shown below.
PRINCE2 Techniques for Quality Management
PRINCE2 has a nifty three-step quality management technique that revolves around planning quality, controlling quality, and accepting products. It’s all about focusing on products, as shown below.

This approach ensures that the project products align with the project’s quality management approach through a step-by-step cycle of quality planning, quality control, and product acceptance.
If your business has its own product design, development, and testing procedures, you can use an alternative procedure instead. Just make sure to document this as part of the tailoring decisions in the project initiation documentation.
Planning Quality
Gathering User Inputs
First things first, we need to gather the user’s quality expectations and acceptance criteria.
These are documented in the project product description and produced during the process of starting up a project.
This description is a primary input to the PRINCE2 planning technique and quality planning. The goal is to create two management products:
- Product Descriptions: Detailing the quality specifications for each product and associated quality tolerances.
- Quality Management Approach: Describing the supporting techniques and standards to be applied, and the roles and responsibilities for achieving the required quality specifications and acceptance criteria.


Creating Product Descriptions
The requirements in the project product description are usually stated at a high level and need to be developed in further detail for accurate estimation and planning.
It’s not uncommon for a few user quality expectations to translate into dozens of quality specifications in an individual product description.



One of the biggest challenges is achieving consensus on effective measures for product characteristics. For example, it’s not enough to say a new building should house 100 staff.
We need to consider how the building will be used, the nature of the work, and the types of support equipment and facilities required.
These factors must be translated into quality specifications for the design and construction of the building to satisfy the business case.
We need to capture these factors as objective quantitative and qualitative measures:
- Quantitative Measures: Translating requirements into numeric terms (e.g., 100 staff).
- Qualitative Measures: Translating requirements into descriptive terms (e.g., ‘easy to use’). Be careful with qualitative measures, as they can be too vague to assess objectively. For example, ‘easy to use’ should be clarified by describing the level of knowledge and training of the intended user.
It may be useful to distinguish quality specifications in terms of functional and non-functional requirements:
- Functional Requirements: Describes how a product must perform and be used.
- Non-Functional Requirements: Describes inherent characteristics of the product, such as its security or reliability.
Describing the Quality Management Approach
The quality management approach is often developed alongside the initial product descriptions.


Its content should ensure the delivery of products that meet the user’s quality expectations and acceptance criteria. It should focus on how quality control will be organized, performed, monitored, and reported while providing a concise explanation of how quality planning has occurred.
The quality management approach describes the quality standards and procedures to be followed, the tools and techniques to be used, the reporting and record-keeping arrangements, and the roles and responsibilities for quality management activities.
Controlling Quality
Once the quality management approach and initial product descriptions are approved, the focus shifts to quality control.

Quality control activities are recorded in the quality register, which provides information for end-stage reports and the end project report.
The quality register records the quality control activity and its result (typically as ‘pass’ or ‘fail’).
If a product fails a quality control activity, such as an inspection or test, and there’s an expectation that it will pass, it may be reasonable to repeat the activity.
If a product cannot pass a quality control activity, the failure must be reviewed against quality tolerances and specifications. Exceptions to quality tolerances and off-specifications are addressed using the issue management technique.
Lessons identified during the product quality lifecycle are captured in the project log: lessons log.
Accepting Products
The individuals or roles responsible for accepting a product are identified in the product description.
Acceptance usually involves reviewing the product quality control information provided by the project and an independent review of the product against the user’s quality expectations and acceptance criteria.
Acceptance of a project product typically transfers ownership or responsibility for the product from the project or supplier to the project board on behalf of the user.
PRINCE2 7 Supporting Techniques
Understanding the types of quality techniques used and their timing, location, and resource requirements is essential to project planning. Here are some commonly used quality techniques in a project context:
- Verification: Confirms that interim products (e.g., project design) reflect the necessary quality specifications and acceptance criteria and ensures the delivery method follows good practices.
Occurs during the design and development of a product before the actual product exists and usually requires support from specialists in the relevant products or methods. - Validation: Confirms that the product meets the quality specifications and acceptance criteria.
Occurs during testing or after the product exists and usually requires support from specialists in the relevant products and may require arranging for independent testing. - Prototyping: Produces an interim product to obtain early feedback on its functionality or understand full-scale production concerns. Integral to an iterative-incremental delivery method such as Agile; sometimes referred to as beta testing.
May also involve production and use of alternate versions of a product, such as in A/B testing, where multiple versions are compared to determine the preferred one. - Testing: Involves using the product, its components, or some portion of its functionality under conditions representative of its intended use. Can occur at multiple times during development and delivery and in different locations.
For example, testing at a supplier’s facility can reduce the risk of costs and delays that might be encountered at the user’s location.
Similarly, live testing in the operational environment may be required to confirm the product is fit for operational use. - Inspection: Confirms that the product complies with quality specifications and acceptance criteria. Usually occurs at the point of delivery and is most applicable to commodities and commercial off-the-shelf products.
- Certification: Presentation of proof that the product or supplier complies with applicable industry or regulatory requirements. Usually occurs at the point of delivery and requires the lowest level of effort. Only applicable to commercial off-the-shelf products.
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