PRINCE2 Quality Management – Part 2
Delivering the correct level of quality
When it comes to PRINCE2 Quality Management, PRINCE2 is very practical regarding quality and does not suggest that every project needs “top quality”
Instead of doing that, the PRINCE2 method focuses on appropriate quality, has not every project is safety critical. If your project is “quick and dirty”, then PRINCE2 how to deliver at that level. Equally, if your project really is safety critical, it lets you deliver at that level as well.
Take care not to overstate the quality level that you require as it leads to two problems.
The first is that you pay for high quality when you just don’t need it. This also affects the business case because of the costs, and also affects the time you require, because the extra work lengthens the project.
In turn, that also means the business case benefits will take longer to come on-stream, and this again affects the business case.
The second problem, where you set the quality level much too high, a common reaction when the pressure is on to abandon the quality completely: “will never mind, we’ll do the next project properly!”
Quality costs money, so do not overstate the level that you require. But do not understated either, because poor quality can turn out to be even more expensive in the long run.
Have you ever bought something cheaply only to regret it later when it does not do what you want? You often end up buying the more expensive, but better quality item you should have bought in the first place.
The PRINCE2 quality management approach
The quality management approach sets down, amongst other things, just what level of quality you need to achieve within your project. This strategy forms part of the project initiation document (PID).
The strategy is within the PID because the level of quality, as well as the way you achieve it, varies from project to project. If quality was always the same for every project, you wouldn’t need to put a strategy within the PID.
Keeping to your quality management approach can be difficult to do with in the IT community. When discussing quality, the topic of conversation will often drift to agreeing to use live testing where the system goes lives with some vital Computer System, and then you see whether it all works or not.
This foolishness is often driven by senior sales staff committing to short deadlines in order to win business, but those deadlines do not allow enough time for testing. Systems are then installed on customer sites that nearly always fail and the supplier has to do bug fixing in full view of the customer staff.
This lack of attention to quality is seriously damaging the company’s reputation, and if its competitors have a more quality led approach, this will lead to them losing market position and revenue streams.
It is worth mentioning that if a project comes under pressure, and you need to lower the quality to save time or money, they should be a conscious decision involving the project board – whereas you don’t reduce quality just because the team left some of the tests are out.
Specifying criteria for project acceptance
PRINCE2 quality works both at a low level and the high level. When using at the high level, PRINCE2 helps you set down quality for the whole project and especially for any final deliverable.
It does this at two levels, both of which are written into the project product description.
PRINCE2 Customer quality expectations
The customer quality expectations define what the customer side of the project is looking for. It is these expectations that can be a bit on the vague side such as “it needs to be fast and durable”.
In writing the quality management strategy, these expectations are translated into two something more measurable, and this is called the acceptance criteria.
PRINCE2 acceptance criteria
Acceptance criteria are for the whole project and must be measurable.
They can be knew as the quality management strategy is written, or some may be refinements of the customer quality expectations. The purpose here, is that the project will be accepted if the criteria are met. The criteria can include timings such as the delivery date of the project.
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