Project Quality Management: What Went Wrong?

Michelle Stronach has over 20 years of experience in the project management field, with experience creating successful PMOs and implementing project, portfolio management and IT governance frameworks. Michelle truly appreciates the value of feedback and welcomes comments on her articles. https://twitter.com/mlstronach

  Diversity   Governance   Organizational Culture   PMO   Quality  

Quality management within the project context is one of those knowledge topics that inconspicuously cross the realms of project lifecycles, product lifecycles and organizational processes. Project success is not measured on completion of a deliverable, but on how well end products meet expectations. It makes perfect sense for the project to plan and do what is needed to quality requirements are defined, met and validated.

Oftentimes how project quality requirements are defined and validated is guided by broader organizational methodologies or processes, or policies. Project quality assurance is more affective when coming from an arms-length perspective to provide an independent view of how well the project is meeting appropriate standards.

For the project manager, the multiple layers of organizational quality management can create challenges. Absent any organizational protocols, the project team is left to cultural indifferences to quality and must re-invent the wheel with only their collective scope of experiences for self-evaluation and guidance.

The support of organizational protocols can aid the team by providing broader context and independent views, but the team can still experience challenges if the project doesn't quite fit prescribed methodologies--or when policies are so far removed from the project context that the any hope of beneficial guidance …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.