What does quality mean for a project?
Project managers understandably respond to the pressure to deliver on time, and somewhere close to budget. Quality can often end up as the poor relation to these two very obvious measures of success. However, once the project team has packed up, and an organisation has to live with the fruit of its labours, what usually matters most? For the majority of projects, we believe that the quality of delivery is by far the most important dimension.
The term quality means many things to many people. Sometimes it’s used in the “gold plated” sense. However, for a project we apply a more pragmatic definition: meeting expectations and requirements. So put simply, your objective is to deliver your project with your customers accepting that what you’ve supplied is fit for its intended purpose.
To achieve this you’ll need to agree a specific set of deliverables before you start work. This needs to be more than just a simple list and should be a rich description of all of the important features. You’ll also need to work with your customers to agree which requirements are absolutely essential for the project to meet its objectives. The resulting mandatory requirements equip you with a minimum fit-for-purpose baseline.
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Fit-for-purpose baseline top tips
- Ensure the people who agree the quality baseline are also involved in the project sign-off. This will achieve a consistent view on what’s fit-for-purpose.
- The definition of a mandatory requirement is that if it’s not met, the whole delivery has to be rejected. Use this acid test to encourage your customers to be reasonable about what’s listed as essential.
- Agree the relative priority of optional add-ons too. Treats aren’t of equal importance, and you may have to sacrifice some in favour of others.
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Brilliant project managers know that their long-term reputations stand or fall on what they deliver. So, unless you’re planning on putting on your running shoes the day before your project delivers, work with your customers to define quality and make achieving this your primary goal.
Methods Consulting's comment
In the rush to get a new project off the ground, it’s essential that key assumptions on both sides about what will be delivered are discussed and then documented to ensure that everyone’s expectations match as closely as possible from the outset. In Methods Consulting’s experience, Barker and Cole are exactly right in linking Quality to clear definition of requirements. With IS projects, controlling scope as a project progresses is particularly important - since attempting to ‘bolt on’ too many additional features to an initially simple application can result in an unstable architecture that fails many Quality criteria. In our view, PRINCE2 provides an effective framework for defining and managing projects to agreed Quality standards – especially if applied pragmatically.