Managing Quality in a Program Management Plan (Part 2)

Joe Wynne is a versatile Project Manager experienced in delivering medium-scope projects in large organizations that improve workforce performance and business processes. He has a proven track record of delivering effective, technology-savvy solutions in a variety of industries and a unique combination of strengths in both process management and workforce management.

  Program Management   Quality  

In Part 1, a rationale was provided to justify creating a quality management section in a Program Management Plan. The rationale was based on an example showing how hidden benefits losses occur due to the inadequate management of quality across all projects within a program. The example showed that what appears to be adequate quality in one project can adversely affect interrelated projects, reducing overall program value. Worse, individual project managers cannot easily plan for the situation or see the problem in time.

A big part of the problem is that projects may utilize very different methods necessary to measure quality. For example, the quality of a newly configured vendor system is measured by user acceptance testing but the quality of a new multi-channel marketing campaign is tested on focus groups and web-based pilots. The situation is made more complex by the projects themselves; they start at different times and have different interdependencies with the other projects.

So with all this complexity, how can you possibly guide quality management in your Program Management Plan? The explanation will require that you recall from Part 1 the three example projects in the program for Product N:

• Project 1: Integrating new vendor platform to provide customer access to purchase and obtain support for Product N
• Project 2
  • Work stream A: …

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