Quality in Projects: Don’t Confront Me!

Paul has run a plethora of projects in multiple industries throughout his 20-year career, ranging from process improvement to agile to most recently cyber-security. Paul is also a reputable speaker, drawing practical and humorous conclusions from the "trenches" of his employers. Paul's dedication as a PM practitioner started decades ago, when he became one of the first 10,000 people to earn the PMP.

  Quality  

If you are a “boots on the ground” project manager handling the day-to-day challenges of your IT project, should quality matter to you--or “confront” you, as George Thorogood sang? Scope, schedule and budget are enough to monopolize the project manager’s attention, in addition to fighting issues and mitigating risks. Moreover, there’s all that communication that is needed: keeping on our sponsor’s radar, routine statuses, managing the hand-offs from one group to another, etc. Shouldn’t quality be someone else’s concern, e.g. the sponsor or SME? Shouldn’t the functional managers own that? Do we have time to make it our concern?

One could argue that it’s no concern of the project manager. The usual angles of the triple constraint only account for scope, schedule and budget, although many variations of the triple constraint make mention of quality. Most of these variations put quality right in the middle of the triangle, and with so many variations it’s tough to say where quality fits in.

In A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide)—Fifth Edition, the triple constraint graphic is nowhere to be found, so no “official” version exists. In any project management job description, one is likely to find at best a high-level, generic one-liner on quality objectives …

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