PRINCE2 Quality Management – Part 1
Quality Management leads to project success
The objective of managing projects is about delivering on time and within budget or at least that’s what you often hear. But that just is not true.
What is the point of delivering a load of unusable rubbish on time and within budget?
Project management is about delivering on time, within budget, and to quality standards. Quality is a vital third dimension.
The PRINCE2 project management method is excellent and managing quality, unfortunately the official Manual provides too much focus on definitions and processes, and therefore does not explain very well how quality works.
It is obvious to most people that quality is important in projects, however people think they will get away with neglecting it, and for this reason quality is often the first casualty and an easy target if the project comes under pressure.
Most organisations focus strongly and time and cost only and is therefore a challenge for the project manager to push for good quality management, even though project quality is the most important element within many projects.
If the project delivers on time and to budget but the deliverables do not work properly, people will still be complaining about its several years later and long after the problems have been fixed.
In contrast, if a project delivers a couple of months late but everything worked perfectly, several years later everyone is usually forgotten and it was late.
PRINCE2 uses a product lead powerful planning approach where you define what you were going to produce, the deliverables or products, before you try to list the activities and resources you need to build them.
As well as being a powerful technique, the product led approach to planning leads to very precise control over quality and this is a key point you need to absorb in order to understand quality management within the PRINCE2 method.
You can’t specified quality for an activity very easily, but you can specify measurable quality criteria for a product. Within PRINCE2 projects you list these quality criteria on the product descriptions, and these will be used to help define every product.
PRINCE2 product descriptions
You write a product description for every products identified at project level, and then again when the products are broken down into more detail within each stage.
The product description defines what the product is the also sets down the exact standards the products must meet, their quality criteria. Also it defines how you measure them, the quality methods, boundaries for quality, such as upper and lower limits of machine performance, quality tolerance, who performs the quality checks, quality check skills needed and also responsibilities for the actual checking.
The set of product descriptions also includes a project product description for the whole project, usually the final deliverable.
PRINCE2 brings high precision to quality by adopting the product focus in its approach to planning and control, and because of this it is an extremely powerful aspect of the method.
The importance of PRINCE2 quality management
Having established the quality is very important, it needs to be taken seriously. Organisations can easily play games and give the appearance of delivering quality when actually they are not.
Compliance with international quality standards is an example of this thinking. How many organisations start with “we want the quality certification label, now what’s a minimum we have to do to get it?”. The correct approach would be “we care about quality so let’s get the certification as evidence of that”
How many senior managers sign every page of quality manuals without actually reading the pages? This shoddy approach to quality should not be tolerated as you have to get quality right.
… to be continued …
