Teamwork: The Best Quality Tool

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Quality   Requirements Management  

You don’t need me to tell you how important teamwork is if a project is going to be successful. It’s one of those cornerstones that we hear all of the time--how the team working together will be able to achieve so much more than a group of individuals. It’s perfectly true of course, but it is in danger of becoming a cliché.

In this article I want to apply that teamwork concept to something very practical--the process of helping to ensure that a project delivers quality. This is an area where some team members may not feel as though they have a role to play, so it’s also an area where the benefits of teamwork are fairly easy to see.

On many projects, quality is thought about in two areas--requirements definition and testing. At the requirements stage, the quality standards are defined and the expectations agreed to; while in testing, the output of the project is measured against those standards to ensure compliance. The problem here is that neither of those two areas has anything to do with ensuring that the quality actually happens.

Requirements are defined before the work starts, and testing happens after the work is complete. The bit in-between--where the work gets done--is a “black box” as far as quality elements are concerned, and that’s a problem. Ultimately, the ability to achieve a project’s quality …

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