Project Quality Plan (PQP) Tutorial | Ultimate Guide to Learn [BEST & NEW]

Introduction:

Each project delivers something at the end of the project execution.When it comes to the project initiation, the project management and the client collaboratively explain the objectives and the deliveries of the project together with the completion timelines.Project deliverables are made at various stages during the project’s execution.All these deliveries should adhere to certain quality standards as well as particular client requirements.Therefore, each of these deliveries should be checked and verified before delivering to the client.There should be a quality assurance function, which runs from start to the end of the project.When it comes to the quality, not only a quality of the deliveries that matter the most.The processes or activities that produce deliverables should also adhere to certain quality rules as well.As a principle, if the processes and activities that create the deliverables do not adhere to their own quality standards (process quality standards).Then there is a more probability that deliverables not meeting the delivery quality standards.To address all the quality needs, standards and quality assurance mechanisms in a project, a document called ‘project quality plan’ is developed by a project team.This plan acts as the quality bible for the project and all the stakeholders of the project to a project quality plan.

3 processes in project quality management:

In order for the project to meet its quality requirements.It must follow 3 processes:

1. Quality planning: This process containing identifying the following information:

• The project’s quality needs
• What makes a deliverable acceptable
• How quality will be maintained and controlled throughout the project’s life cycle
• How to measure quality
• How quality data will be delivered, such as through meetings or by
• The requirements (e.g., years of experience, licenses, certificates, etc.) for team members, suppliers, and contractors, and how those requirements are to be met in order to successfully complete a project.
• Which training must be offered to particular personnel
• What to do when quality issues are found
• Which quality reports and the documents to prepare — and by whom
• All this data is documented in the project quality plan, which will then be shared with everyone involved for approval.

2. Quality assurance: Quality assurance offers customers, certifying bodies, and other relevant stakeholders with the confidence that the project’s quality needs will be achieved.

Quality assurance activities contain:

• Explaining and standardizing project management processes
• Documenting and recording the test performances and quality reviews
• Collecting lessons learned so same mistakes can be avoided in the future projects
• Establishing a quality culture in which everyone does their share to generate a quality product

3. Quality control: Quality control is part of the much higher quality assurance umbrella and focuses on inspection techniques and operational activities implemented during project execution to satisfy project quality expectations.It ensures deliverables are of the highest quality and following established standards.

Quality control activities contain:

• Conducting product testing,
• Quality reviews ,
• Audits ,
• Assessments
• To ensure deliverables follow:
• Rules
• Standards
• Plans
• Processes
• Identifying non-compliance and what’s causing project of quality to fail
• Maintaining quality control records for comparison against baselines and agreed-upon limits.
• Recommending corrective actions to increase and keep product or service quality

The Components of a Project Quality Plan: Depending on the nature of the industry and the nature of the project, the components or the areas addressed by a quality plan may difference.However, there are few components that can be find in any type of quality plan.Let’s have a look at the essential attributes of a project quality plan.

Responsibility of Management: This explains how the management is responsible for achieving the project quality.Since management is the controlling and screening function for the project, project quality is majorly a management responsibility.

Document Management and Control:

• Documents are the major method of communication in project management.
• Documents are used for communication between the team members, project management, senior management and a client.
• Therefore, the project quality plan should explain a way to manage and control the documents used in the project.
• Usually, there can be a general documentation repository with controlled access in order to save and retrieve the documents.

Requirements Scope:

• The correct needs to be implemented are listed here.
• This is an abstraction of the need to sign-off documents.
• The quality assurance team can more effectively verify that criteria are met if they are documented in the project quality plan.
• In this approach, the quality assurance process is clear on what is within its purview and what is not.
• For a service provider, it may be futile to test for features or functions that aren’t included in the contract.

Design Control:

• This specifies the controls and procedures used for the design phase of a project.
• There should be design reviews in order to analyze the correctness of the proposed technical design.
• For fruitful design reviews, senior designers or the architects of the respective domain should get involved.
• Once the designs are reviewed and agreed, they are signed-off with a client.
• With the time, the client may come up with modifiers to the requirements or new requirements.
• In such cases, design may change.
• Each time the design changes, the changes should be reviewed and signed-off.

Development Control and Rigor: Once the construction of the project starts, all the processes, rules and activities should be closely monitored and measured.By this type of control, the project management can make sure that the project is progressing in the correct way.

Testing and Quality Assurance: This component of the project quality plan takes precedence over the other components.This is the element, which explains the main quality assurance functions of the project.This section should clearly identify the quality objectives for a project and the approach to achieve them.

Risks & Mitigation: This section identifies project quality risks.Then, the project management team should come up with appropriate mitigation plans in order to address every quality risk.

Quality Audits: For each project, regardless of its size or the nature, there should be periodic quality audits to measure the adherence to a quality standards. These audits can be done by an internal team or the external team.Sometimes, the client may employ external audit teams to measure the compliance to standards and rules of the project processes and activities.

Defect Management: During testing and quality assurance, defects are usually caught.This is general when it comes to software development projects.The project quality plan should have rules and instructions on how to manage the defects.

Training Requirements: Each project team needs some kind of training before the project commences.For this, a skill gap analysis is done to identify the training needs at the project initiation phase.The project quality plan should denote these training requirements and necessary steps to get the staff trained.

QUALITY PLAN EXAMPLE:

• An example of a quality plan is a manufacturing company that machines metal parts.
• Its quality plan contains applicable procedures (describing the production process and responsibilities), applicable workmanship standards, the measurement tolerances acceptable, the explanation of the material standards, and so forth.
• These may all be separate documents.
• More variable data that pertains to a specific customer may be spelled out on single work orders (sometimes called travelers)
• . Work orders specify the machine setups and tolerances, operations to be performed, tests, inspections, handling, packaging, and delivery steps to be followed.
• An operating-level quality plan translates the customer needs (the what) into actions required to produce the desired outcome (the how) and couples this with applicable procedures, standards, practices, and rules to specify precisely what is needed, who will do it, and how it will be done.
• A quality control plan may specify product tolerances, testing parameters, and an acceptance criteria.
• While the terminology may be different, the basic approach is similar for service and other kinds of organizations.

QUALITY PLAN DOCUMENTATION AND DEPLOYMENT:

Quality plans result from both the deployed strategic quality policies .And from the specific legal regulations, industry standards, organization rules and procedures, internal guidelines, and good practices needed to meet customers’ requirements for products or services.Strategic-level quality plans are created and deployed through the strategic planning process.These broad-based quality plans become the rule for each function or department supporting the quality plan.Where appropriate, every function or department may develop and internally deploy operating-level quality plans.Operating-level quality plans often are the resulting document(s) from the production scheduling function.

As such, this documentation often contains blueprints, a copy of the customer’s order, references to applicable standards, practices, procedures, and work instructions, and details on how to produce the particular product or service.When the product or service is produced, the planning documents are augmented by inspection documentation, statistical process control (SPC) charts, and copies of shipping documents and customer-required certifications.In the process, the plans are transformed from documents to records.In an entirely computerized system, the documents mentioned may well be interactive computer screens accessed at operators’ workplaces and control points.These screens, internally, become records when operators, inspectors, shippers, and others make computer entries to the screens.A completed set of matrices, developed by a quality function deployment (QFD) process, fulfills a component of an organization’s quality plan. The main purpose of QFD is to capture and deploy the customers’ needs and requirements for organization.

Documenting the quality plan(s) has multiple uses, are:

1. 1.Ensuring conformance to the customer requirements
2. 2.Ensuring conformance to external and internal standards and rules
3. 3.Facilitating traceability
4. 4.Providing an objective evidence
5. 5.Furnishing a basis for the training
6. 6.Together with more plans for the organization’s products, services, and projects.
7. 7.Offer a basis for evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the quality management system (QMS).

Conclusion:

Project quality plan is one of the important documents for any type of project.As long as a project has explained objectives and deliverables, there should be a project quality plan to measure the delivery and process quality.