Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Recently there has been a discussion about which areas of the PMBOK® Guide are hardest to learn. Quality came up a few times: in my view that’s because the quality management techniques are not often put into practice.
On a training course I did recently, one of the delegates from a construction background felt that it was all second-nature, but others in the group had very little experience of quality techniques because the industries they worked in didn’t require the same focus on a quality outcome. It’s not that they didn’t care about quality, it’s just that it manifested itself in a different way in their jobs and they took a different approach to getting there.
So today I’m going to talk about one of the aspects of quality management: the cost of quality.
What Makes Up The Cost of Quality?
The cost of quality is made up of two things:
- Cost of conformance
- Cost of non-conformance.
Let’s look at each of those.
The Cost of Conformance
The cost of conformance is all about the work you put in to get a quality result. It’s the time and effort taken to ensure that the outcome is what you would expect and what meets your quality targets.
It is made up of things like:
- Training courses: both the cost of doing the course and paying the trainer etc and the time involved in putting people through the course.
- Documentation: the time taken to write it and the cost of getting it printed (or, more likely, your websites amended to put the documentation online)
- Verification and validation: any verification and validation activities you do to verify the deliverables against your quality plan.
- Testing: the cost of testers or testing tools, plus the time taken to go through a full testing cycle.
- Audits: if you are subject to formal quality audits, they take time and effort too.
- Internal reviews: if you don’t have formal quality audits planned then you probably have informal reviews in your schedule. These also take time.
These activities cost money, and you pay out the money in the hope that the project’s deliverables will be better quality and that they will be used in the best possible way. The time and money spent on the cost of conformance is what you hope drives the best business value from your deliverables.
The Cost of Non-Conformance
Not working with quality in mind also costs money. Money drains through your contingency budget if you aren’t careful because not delivering things right first time takes its toll on your cost management and your project schedule.
For example:
- Scrap: if you have to throw away deliverables and start again, that is wasted money and time.
- Rework: equally, if you have to go back and polish deliverables because they weren’t right first time, that also costs money and time.
- Complaint handling: unhappy stakeholders take time to talk round. You might also find your project funding baskets of fruit or something similar to apologise to people. It happens, but it costs money (and time).
- Product recalls: you’ll see this in the press every so often, like the Toyota recall of cars with faulty airbags or the new tumble dryer we needed as our last one was recalled. The effort in managing a product recall, plus the cost of the negative publicity, is massive. You don’t want your project to be associated with that. Note that this cost may well come a while after your project is formally closed, but it’s still a cost to the company for a job that wasn’t done to the right quality standards.
- Lost future business: let’s not forget that the cost of getting something wrong, even if you then do put it right, could be that the client doesn’t want to work with you again. That’s lost business and while it’s hard to put a financial figure on it you could if it results in them cancelling an existing contract.
On Balance…
So, getting to ‘quality’ can cost you from various aspects. Is it worth it? Absolutely. In fact, it’s more likely that the potential cost of non-conformance will far outweigh the cost of putting quality measures in place and following through on them.
Whether you currently do a formal quality plan or not, it’s a good idea to take a few minutes to work out whether the cost of quality is something that is being taken seriously by your project team at the moment. If not, what are you going to do about it to improve the quality culture and schedule in some cost of conformance tasks to give yourselves a better chance of success?
Posted on: September 19, 2016 12:00 AM |
Permalink