Include quality planning in scope

D E F I N I T I O N

A quality plan is a document that describes how quality is to be achieved during the project. Like any plan, it includes timescales, milestones and resources: namely, what quality activities are to take place and who will do them.

B A N K I N G O N P R O J E C T M O N I T O R I N G ( P A R T 1 )

Ian Duthie, a senior project manager at Lloyds TSB, was working on a human resources (HR) project with a vast scope, including payroll integration, web-enabled direct access for some HR processes to employees, web-accessed processes for line managers and enhanced management information. The project was part of a larger programme aiming to extend the model of using just one HR department for the entire group – no mean feat for a company operating across 27 countries, with subsidiary companies Cheltenham &

Gloucester, Lloyds TSB Scotland, Scottish Widows and Goldfish. The project was scheduled to be implemented in a series of releases and involved a team of around 160 people.

On a project of this scale, monitoring the quality of the deliverables was going to be a large job. The quality plan set out the standards for the project and how and when quality deliverables such as project health checks and quality assurance reviews would be built in to the overall activities. ‘This was a project that had been running under an external project manager,’

Duthie explains. ‘When it was brought in house, we applied our own internal controls to it, one of which was a quality plan.’

The team was fortunate in that it was able to reuse parts of a quality plan from another project. ‘We based the plan on something we’d done for another part of the organization on the same project,’ Duthie says. To get the quality plan for the £50-million project recognized as part of the

‘official’ documentation, it was essential to have it signed off and approved by the teams involved. ‘The overall plan was signed off by the programme manager, while the various deliverables were signed off at the appropriate level within the business and IT departments,’ Duthie says. ‘Some of the approvals took place by way of a “desk check”, where the relevant people read through the document. Other approvals were more formal and were reviewed in meetings.’

Having a plan is only half the work: Duthie knew that getting the team to stick to it was going to be a challenge. ‘We did stick to it!’ he says. ‘The fact that focus was kept on the quality plan was probably due to the nature of

Project Management in the Real World

the people who were tasked with ensuring that the various deliverables were met.’ The project team linked the quality plan to the project deliverable plan and made sure that major points for quality signoff were documented in the main project plan. ‘As deliverables were due at various stages throughout the project, there was always a focus on the deliverable and milestone plan, and the quality deliverables just kept on coming up!’ he adds.

The quality plan should include:

• any standards that must be adhered to;

• quality control and quality assurance methods;

• responsibilities: who will carry out the activities;

• quality tools (if you are going to use any);

• a reference to the change-control process that the project will follow.

The quality plan will also reference the project acceptance criteria and may include the configuration management procedures too.

D E F I N I T I O N

Quality control is the day-to-day activity of making sure the work delivered is up to scratch. It is done by the project team.

D E F I N I T I O N

Quality assurance is normally carried out by someone outside the project. It is an independent check.

There are two main parts to a quality plan: the definition and standards, and the schedule.

The first part of your quality plan sets out your definition of quality. Qual­

ity is a very vague concept. Svetlana Cicmil asks a good question in TQM Magazine, referring to the golden triangle we saw in the introduction to this section: ‘If meeting time, budget and specification requirements within a given scope of project work are always a matter of trade-off among these variables . . . how should quality in a project situation be defined?’²⁴

Each project and organization will have a different definition of what qual­

ity means. You will need to decide what it means in relation to your project.

This can be a difficult task, so start by thinking: ‘How will we know that what we deliver and the way in which we deliver it will be good enough?’ Dig out some corporate documentation or ask around as a starting point using this checklist of questions:

• What project-management standards or methodologies are we expec­

ted to follow?

• What IT coding standards exist in the organization? For example, how will code be checked and tested before being implemented?

Include quality planning in scope

• Are there any industry standards to follow?

• Are there health and safety considerations to meet?

• What other legal requirements or generally accepted norms do we have to deliver to?

• What standard does the customer expect from a final product?

• How will these standards be measured?

Documenting these points forms part of your quality plan: setting out the standards to which you choose to work. If there aren’t any, get your thinking cap on and come up with a framework that your team can agree to work within.

The second major part of your quality plan is a schedule of when qual­

ity activities will happen. Some will be integral and ongoing, for example proofreading a document before sending it out for comment. There is no need to record these. For each major project deliverable, specify:

• what will be tested;

• when it will be tested;

• who will do the testing;

any tools that will be used;

•

• how the results will be recorded.

Also in this section include any planned dates for quality assurance reviews and who will be responsible for coordinating them.

The change-control procedure either will be documented fully in the qual­

ity plan or readers should be pointed towards another description of how changes will be managed. For more on change control, flick back a few pages to Chapter 13.

Delivering a quality product at the end of your project, whatever that may be, will go a long way to securing your reputation as a competent project manager. However, you may want to keep your quality activities low-key. Lynn Crawford discovered that paying attention to quality is a characteristic top managers associate with low performers. Managers in her 2005 study saw top performers as people with skills in many other project management areas, but being good at quality management actually decreased the likelihood of being seen as a great project manager.²⁵

G O L D E N R U L E S

Quality is something that must be worked at throughout the life of the project, and having a quality plan will define how that can be achieved.