Create These Seven Elements of a Quality Management Plan
The Quality Management Plan describes how you will ensure the client’s quality requirements are achieved. It is the place to describe the processes and activities that will be put into place to ensure that quality deliverables are produced. The Quality Management Plan also helps you understand when deliverables are complete and correct.
The quality requirements are unknown when the Quality Management Plan is created. Still, it would be best if you described the processes and techniques you will use to uncover the quality requirements and verify that the requirements are met. The information in the Quality Management Plan includes:
- Roles and responsibilities. Describe the different quality-related roles on the project. The project manager has overall responsibility, but you may have other roles assisting. These could include quality auditors, third-party testing specialists, inspectors, etc.
- Completeness and correctness criteria. The completeness and correctness criteria aim to work with the customer upfront to define what it means for a deliverable to be considered complete and correct. Then, when you meet those terms, you expect the customer to be satisfied. In other words, there should be no surprises.
- Quality requirements process. Describe the process you will use to uncover and validate the customer’s expectations for quality. This is generally going to be a part of the requirements-gathering process.
- Quality assurance activities. Quality assurance activities focus on the processes used to build the solution. They can be validated by a functional manager, business sponsor, or a third-party reviewer. It would help if you described this project’s major quality assurance activities and techniques.
- Quality control activities. Quality control activities are performed continually throughout a project to verify that project deliverables are acceptable. It would help if you described the major quality control activities and techniques that will be used on this project.
- Quality standards. List any quality standards that the company or organization has previously defined that this project will follow.
Quality tools. List any quality-related tools that your project will utilize.
The Quality Management Plan is where you think beforehand about how you will understand the customers’ expectations for quality and how you will deliver to that expectations. Once the project starts, this Plan guides how you will manage quality throughout the project.