During the planning phase, project management is concerned with organising and preparing schedules, budgets, and project specifics. These plans will include details about staffing requirements and procurement, in attempts to fully understand project execution and required resources to achieve the fit-for-purpose outcomes desired by the client. This planning phase also includes creating the control mechanisms that will ultimately dictate levels of success. Here we look at the planning of quality management, the first step in the process outlined in our last post.

How does project management achieve a plan for quality management?

When planning how to tackle quality management throughout a project’s lifetime, project management will first be concerned with the specification of the quality expected of all project deliverables. These will have been first discussed and set out in the project scope document, but this quality management planning phase will explore in further detail. This further detail will include the alignment of all quality specifications to individual deliverables and stakeholders’ requirements.

Only once this initial work has been completed can a quality management process be planned, with due regard to the cost of controlling quality throughout the project and at each phase.

With the quality management process drafted, project management can then concern itself with reviewing all contracts for quality issues and plan for possible outcomes – and any remedial work that may be required to address any issues or problems. Such issues should be documented, with all learnings shared and applied immediately and to future project work.

With the plan documented and all stakeholders made aware of its remit, the quality management planning phase will have been completed. Project management can then move forward with implementation of the change management process and continuous quality management that will ensure all project goals and quality requirements are fully met when closing the project.

The bottom line

The success of a project relies on several factors, not least of which is the measurement and maintenance of quality throughout. Quality management activities must be planned ahead of time, with project management ensuring that correct tools and techniques are employed and quality measured against known metrics. Only with such a plan in place can the project manager initiate corrective actions in a timely fashion and ensure project deliverables comply to customer needs.