Connecting Practice

Poor quality plan can limit quality statement, process, and/or criteria’s success and could even cause the quality statement, process, and/or criteria to fail. By not fixing the problem, one could find further concerns down the line of the quality operation, such as:

• poor procedures to maximize quality control potentials;
• poor project understanding and project team rejection to ideas due to deficient documentation;
• increase of overhead in undertaking quality checks; and
• problems take longer to fix.

Interestingly, some organization don’t want to produce a quality plan due to their belief that developing a quality plan is too complicated and the jargon of quality plan in relation to compliance with quality standards, policies, templates, checklists, criteria, guidelines, metrics, and a range of acronyms are too overwhelming and could leave them confused. This supports the problem and block them to solve their issues and/or concerns.

Viewing the above situations, one needs to find solution and ensure that the desired quality is achieved and that project outputs are fit for purpose; and meet all quality standards, policies, checklists, criteria, guidelines, and metrics in a straightforward and objective way.

The following are sample activities that one could take on to achieve desired quality:

1. Use a quality plan template to describe, structure, develop, organize, and finalize the quality plan with the project team. This includes:

a.) Get the project team ready with the undertaking by communicating the quality process and general requirements and supporting documents for establishing and mutual understanding on project facts. This includes collaborating with the project team for agreement, ideas development, information development, mutual understanding, utilization, and decision making; identifying the quality control tasks of project team needed to control quality; listing the quality assurance activities required to assure quality; and obtaining the project team with tools, training, techniques, and assistance.

b.) Identify and define clearly the desirable quality goals or targets with the project sponsor, client, and team members on a project.

c.) Perform analysis development. This includes thinking about what needs to be done and what could go wrong.

2. Create a cohesive dialog by bring project sponsor and client to a quality review. It could make them more comfortable if they see that quality is being addressed during the start of the project.

3. Expose project sponsor and client to the complexities and potential quality problems and/or issues that usually exist in a project for awareness. This includes ensuring them that you have a mechanism in place to fix the quality problems and/or issues.

4. Execute the quality plan. This includes preparing plan and actions to counter any weaknesses or deficiencies in the quality plan execution.

5. Develop follow up process to allocate fixes to particular people and ensure they actually make the changes. This implies that time must be built into the schedule for rework following review and verification processes.

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