Project quality management

Good day...

If there is one thing that most project managers are willing to sacrifice in order to be perceived as delivering a successful project, I can bet quality will be the answer. It is a common knowledge that project managers will try everything they can to keep time and budget, as missing a milestone or asking for extra budget is very obvious to the project sponsor and other key stakeholders. On the other hand, a minor slip in the quality might go unnoticed by others.

Whilst it might be true that slip in quality is not immediately spotted, remember that once something goes wrong in production, there is no place to hide for the project manager. a production issue due to unmet quality standard will bring the project under spotlight. This is especially true when the issue is impacting external customers, which might lead to reputational risk of the organization, or in some cases even lead to immediate audit action by external parties.

Having said that, I would like to emphasize that quality is a very important factor to be managed in a project. In technology-related project, having a strong quality assurance team, who is involved since the early stage of the project is highly recommended to mitigate the risk of low quality. It is best that the team consist of people familiar with the project's area of concern, and have the necessary experience in creating a robust test scenario and test cases. The test cases should cover both positive and negative cases, which is the scenario when users perform unexpected things to the system.

In addition to functional test, it is also important to put in place non-functional test, which includes performance test (normal performance, stress test, load test) and security-related test (penetration test). In my organization, there are specific group of people dedicated to be the expert in non-functional test as in this domain mastery of the tools and the presentation skill to clearly explain the result to a larger technical and non-technical team are very critical in obtaining the required attention and performance tuning. The tuning might be in the form of code streamlining or additional hardware resources.

Lastly, user involvement during UAT (User Acceptance Test) is also key to ensure expected system behavior in production. This is especially true when the project outcome is used directly by external customers or producing specific reports, as any glitch in the behavior might lead to high degree of complaints or financial loss.

In conclusion, let's put quality as one of our top priority in delivering a project, in addition to time and budget. Should you face a constraint among the three, it is always better to have an open conversation with your project sponsor and key stakeholders to find a middle ground, such as delivering the project in phases or negotiating the scope.

Edwin

Picture credit: geralt