Managing project quality in organizations without an independent QA department

Define Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to have an objective way to measure the projects. Make sure the KPI's are data driven to avoid any subjectivity.

In many cases, the option of having a separate team or not depends on the organizational policies to control cost based on project funding. If the proect funding includes the budget of keeping a separate team, I dont think there will be a challenge. However I have seen many cases where the funding is crunched to control cost and in that scenario, keeping a separate team becomes challenging to convince the management and leadership. In such cases we should be doing at least following and I am sure there will be more.
1) We should have a detailed quality plan for our team. i:e the project plan should be detailed enough to capture all kind of quality checks
2) Should identify the quality KPIs that needed to be monitored and they should be aligned with the project goal.
3) Roles and responsibility should be divided across team to give ownership of quality checks to senior team members. This is a key step. People in the team should know what is expected out of them and what is their level of ownership
4) Individuals (no matter how junior or senior) should have been made to understand the quality requirement and each one of them should be doing their own quality checks and expectation to be set to all
5) The project plan should accommodate few steps like Self Check, Peer Check and final inspection before the component or the code is sent for integration and owner for each of these checks at component level to be defined along with expectation. Scrum kind of theory where each developer should be doing their own testing , should be followed
6) Look for automation testing areas where testing can be automated (if budget permits)
7) Define coding standards before the start of the project so that everyone needs to follow it. The standards may go through revision based on feedback later.
8) The test cases prepared by team members to be reviewed by senior team members to ensure they cover all the required areas

I am sure there are probably a lot, I could think of these from my recent experience, so thought of sharing.
Regards,
Rajib

Sergio, as rightly stated by you, "quality is subjective and should be defined at enterprise level".
Generally, differences crop up while defining/ quantifying the required level of quality and cost it takes to achieve it.

Identify the level of quality required and get it approved by the steering committee or governance board.

Hi Nasrullah,
I know a lot of people misuse QA/QC and use them interchangeably. They are not the same. If you are worried about Quality Assurance, then you need to engage senior management about creating a specialized unit to measure results. For quality control, like others have hinted at, it should be part of your project plan. Your quality management plan should truly state what quality control measures will be undertaken for your project. If Six sigma (99.99966%) is what is desired, then let your quality management plan have a way of measuring that and work your project activities towards achieving those goals.