Quality Requirements

00:05 The standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something.

00:13 That's how the Cambridge dictionary defines quality but what do we mean when we talk about quality in the context of project management? We can think of quality as the qualitative characteristics of a product, be its physical qualities like its material or contents, its performance like the acceleration of a vehicle or service related such as response time in a customer facing role.

00:38 The project manager will need to work with stakeholders to specify the quality standards of the deliverables of the project and of course, to ensure they are being met.

00:48 To do this, there is a wonderful five step process to follow.

00:53 A list always helps us to remember.

00:57 So, first, the project manager and the stakeholders must define the quality standards and requirements adhering to any laws and regulations.

01:05 For example, building a bridge will require different quality standards than building a website.

01:11 A bridge would need rigorous strength testing, specific materials and special construction methods while a website will require all coding to be accurate, copy to be proofread, no broken links and hopefully, an aesthetically pleasing design.

01:27 Of course, the project manager needs to identify and factor all criteria that the deliverables need to meet and how the specific project work must be executed to ensure standards are met.

01:39 However, depending on the project, the project manager may need a department or external company to take responsibility for quality aspects.

01:48 This will without a doubt involve non-straightforward tasks as there will be multiple people to engage with and approvals to be collected before standards can be finalized.

01:59 The second part of the process focuses on setting the actual and actionable targets for the criteria identified during step one.

02:08 Let's have a look at a few different fields and see how targets are set.

02:13 Field number one, construction.

02:17 As you can imagine, most of the numerous quality standards are set by regulation and therefore require special expertise to be properly managed.

02:27 These are things like structural stability, fire safety, air ventilation, drainage, electrical safety, quality of materials plus so many more.

02:39 Without these regulations met, the project is unlikely to get the required authorization documents.

02:45 Field number two, production. A common way to set targets in production is to look at defect rate.

02:53 Say a company is producing 100,000 units a month and sets targets of less than 50 defected units per month, a 0.05% tolerance, our target.

03:05 Of course, testing of 100,000 units would cost far too much time and money, so, what companies usually do is to lean on statistical methods.

03:16 A common example is to define a sample of units to be tested, say, 1,000 units and then, set a tolerance level, for example, a maximum of 0.05% defective products.

03:29 This means out of the 1,000 tested, no more than five products should have defects.

03:35 Field number three, customer service.

03:38 If a company decides to outsource its call center to an external company, then, to ensure customers are happy, they made aside to set a customer service quality target.

03:49 For example, less than five percent of calls lost per month or over 98% of cases resolved.

03:57 The company may even decide to perform customer surveys after each call, asking the customers to rate their care they have received from one to five with an average target of four or more. That makes sense, right? Okay, so, after steps one and two have been completed, the third step of the process is to plan how and when to measure quality and who will do it.

04:21 The project manager and the stakeholders need to agree on how quality audits will be performed once the project moves into execution.

04:30 For example, this can include things like deciding on the total number of audits, the frequency of the checks and how the results will be reported.

04:39 Project manager and stakeholders need to decide on an owner of the quality checks and if there is no appropriate employee within the organization, then, they must seek external experts.

04:51 Alright, moving on to step four, finalizing the quality plan.

04:55 Now, the project manager takes all the information gain so far and collates it into a simple table.

05:02 The table should show the quality standards, a metric for each standard, the target result, sample size of audits, the frequency of reports and the owner.

05:14 Once all of this is done and dealt with, the final thing for the project manager to do is to make adjustments to their project constraints if necessary.

05:23 A quality plan can increase the scope, the cost, or the time for the project completion in any number of ways, so, a review of this is essential. Right, there's our quality plan.

05:37 We want all aspects of the project to be of the highest quality they can be and the quality plan is here to ensure that this is exactly what we achieve. Excellent.

05:48 Now that we've tackled quality, resources, timing, and scope, it seems that we've covered everything, right? Well, as Murphy 's Law says, anything that can go wrong will.

06:03 So the next crucial thing to talk about is how a project manager identifies risk and plans for their prevention or resolution. See you there.