“Quality” is one thing that everyone desire to have in their personal and professional life. It is one single thing that you constantly look for whether you are shopping, dating, working or just relaxing. A popular phrase is “What is common between a Lion and a Chef?” – The answer is Quality. Lion or chef will never compromise with their food quality. It does not matter how hungry the Lion is, he will never eat grass or vegetarian food. The same apply to the Chef.
So the point is Quality is looked upon in every activity that we do. But do we know, what is the Quality that we often hear in the meetings? This article is for the beginners who want to understand what is quality, where it is coming from, how to measure this etc.
It does not matter whether you are working on a product based or project based module, you always hear about project leads and project managers talking about quality?
What is Quality?
Quality is the degree or parameter to which you fulfill the customer requirement. If customer wants to paint the building in deep aqua color and you are delivering it, you are fulfilling the customer need and giving him quality. It may look odd to the rest of the world, but be assured you are producing quality for your customer.
In the world, Quality is always and always looked from Customer prospective. If customer is happy with the project outcome, you have given him quality work.
One basic thing that you should always remember is:
Quality is always and always measurable. As a project team member, the quality you are delivering can be measured and compared every time or any time.
What is the source of Quality?
Whenever a product or project is initiated the customers always express their requirement in a very simple and generic term. Take some example of requirement;
- A car manufacturer wants to develop a car and wants its cabin to be cool in all temperatures.
- A customer wants his website to load fast on all devices.
- The system should be able to handle all transactions generated.
These project or product requirements examples are simple or say subjective in nature. Quality requirements are not given by customer directly; it is project manager or project team that has to pick the quality requirement from the given subjective customer requirement. The above examples are example of subjective requirement. So as a project manager or project team these are your Quality requirement for the project or product you are working upon.
Do you think, for the requirements like above, you will be able to provide quality to the customer? — My answer is NO. Why?
The reason is if you cannot measure quality, you can claim that you have produce quality. For example, the website load time will be vary with the different internet connection speed. So you have to think following scenario in this situation.
- What should be the website load time on slow internet connection (100KBps speed)?
- What should be the website load time on internet connection (500KBps speed)?
- What should be the website load time on internet connection (2MBps speed)
A Project manager or project team has to discuss the above scenario with client. The website home page will take different time to load with different internet connection speed. You have to provide different time range for each of the internet connection speed. For example, you can set up 20 to 50 seconds load time for internet connection speed of 100KBps. Similarly, you can set up 10 to 40 seconds load time for internet connection speed of 1MBps. When you are doing this with your project and customer, what you are doing is – you are setting up Quality Goal for the Quality requirement.
What we do during the Quality goal setup is we are converting the Subjective Quality requirement into Objective Quality requirement. For each of the quality requirement you set up quality goals. A single Quality goal may be applicable to multiple Quality requirements. Each of the quality goals has a name, description and a client acceptable range.
OK, so you have picked up the quality requirements out of project requirement and setup quality goals for each of the quality requirement. What is next?
The next thing is how you are going to achieve the Quality Goals that you have setup for the project or product. The answer is Quality Standards. Quality standards are set of rules and guidelines that help the project team and project manager to achieve quality goals. Do you peer review the design or code in your project, if yes that is an example of Quality standards that you are applying in your project.
As a project team or project manager you have to specify what quality standards you will be using in your project. The example of Quality standards includes coding standards, checklists, templates, procedures, guidelines etc.
So the story for Project Quality Management starts with collecting Quality requirement, setting up Quality Goals and Quality standards for the project. What is next? I will cover this in next topic. Till then thanks for reading this post and please let me know your valuable suggestions, feedback on this.
- Project Quality Management: What is Quality?
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- How to improve your V.O.I.C.E?
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- PM: Do you know your Project Cost?
