Create Quality Management Plan

The Quality Management Plan describes how you will ensure that the client's quality requirements are achieved and to describe the processes and activities that will be put into place to ensure that quality deliverables are produced. The Quality Management Plan allows you to understand when the deliverables are complete as well as how to show they are correct.

The actual quality requirements are not known at the time the Quality Management Plan is created, but you should describe the processes and techniques that you will use to uncover the quality requirements and verify that the requirements are met. The information in the Quality Management Plan includes:

• Roles and responsibilities. Describe the different quality related roles on the project. The project manager has overall responsibility, but you may have other roles that are assisting. These could include quality auditors, third-party testing specialists, inspectors, etc.

• Completeness and correctness criteria. The purpose of the completeness and correctness criteria is to work with the client up front to define what it means for a deliverable to be considered complete and correct. Then, when you meet those terms, you would expect that the client would be satisfied. If you define the criteria and expectations up front, you will be much better able to meet the client's expectations. In other words, there should be no surprises.

• Quality requirements process. Describe the process you will use to uncover and validate the customer's expectations for quality. This is generally going to be a part of the requirements gathering process.

• Quality assurance activities. Quality assurance activities focus on the processes being used to manage and deliver the solution, and can be performed by an IS Manager, business sponsor, or a third-party reviewer. You should describe the major quality assurance activities and techniques that will be used on this project.

• Quality control activities. Quality control activities are performed continually throughout a project to verify that project management and project deliverables are of high quality. You should describe the major quality control activities and techniques that will be used on this project.

• Quality standards. List any quality standards that the company or organization has previously defined that this project will follow.

• Quality tools. List any quality-related tools that this project will utilize.

Use Quality Assurance Activities to Validate the Processes Used to Build the Deliverables

Quality assurance is focused on the processes you are using to run the project and build the deliverables. There are a number of QA activities that should be considered.

• Quality Audits. Since quality assurance is associated with the processes used to create the deliverables, the most effective technique is a formal quality assurance review or audit. In a quality review a third party asks questions about the processes used to create the deliverables to ensure they are adequate. The deliverable itself does not need to be reviewed during the quality assurance review at all.

The quality audit should also validate that the project quality processes are actually being followed. For instance, if the team had a formal process for managing issues and scope changes, an audit would review project issues and scope changes to see if the processes were, in fact, followed. This would include a review of the Issues Logs, Scope Change Logs, schedule activities, Status Reports, etc. These should all provide an indication of how effectively the team is following its issues and scope management processes.

• Quality planning. Creating a Quality Plan is a way to establish good overall quality processes for your project.

• Quality training. Training is a way to prevent errors.

• QA Checklists. Another quality assurance activity is a checklist that ensures that a standard process was followed. For instance, a checklist could include deliverable completion dates, deliverable review dates, validation that all action items were completed, client approval dates, etc. Since this type of checklist focuses on a process and not the actual deliverable, it is an example of quality assurance.