INSIDER

Plan Quality into Projects, Advises BU Project Management Expert

TYNGSBORO, Mass.—May 29, 2006—Consider the time and effort involved every time a project manager completes a project that doesn't meet expectations. How much re-planning is required? How does the project manager get resources assigned to the project after claiming it was done?

Plan quality into your project, advises a white paper from Boston University. But doing so is “the easiest to state and the most difficult to do,” observes project management expert Rick Cusolito, PMP, in the paper.

Consider also the management levels that get involved in projects that go awry. How much does it cost the company when the senior VP and the chief financial officer sit in on weekly project meetings? The real and figurative costs are worth avoiding.

Project managers, advises Cusolito, should prepare an overall quality plan with three major components:

• Customer quality expectations and acceptance criteria specify that quality is determined by the customer, not by the project manager.
• Configuration management is the discipline of keeping evolving products under control, and thus contributes to satisfying quality constraints.
• Quality control is the way to ensure that deliverables meet the quality criteria specified and to find ways to eliminate the causes of un-quality.

“This doesn't mean adding tests and inspections throughout the project, although some of that is necessary,” Cusolito writes. “Quality is an ongoing process that the project management team needs to focus on throughout the project.”

DIRFT—the goal to Do It Right the First Time—doesn't just refer to the products of the project; it also means managing quality during the initial stages of the project. That way, the plans and designs will give the project management team the information they need to really do it right the first time, and save the project time and money, which are already in short supply.

Cusolito adds that the cost of poor quality is far greater than the cost of DIRFT. The white paper details some of these costs, both obvious and hidden.

Click here to see the white paper.