What is Quality?

Quality is generally a misunderstood concept and can often be a subject for tension and power struggles.  Back in the 1990’s, quality was like the top power place during the days of ISO certification and such.  However, that was short lived and people eventually began to focus more on business again and project management has since taken the front seat.

That said, many project managers have had to handle struggles that have led to scope creep in the name of quality.  Often, this is because the project manager himself truly doesn’t understand the nature of quality and respects the person telling him that the change will make for a higher quality project.  Additionally, the project manager naturally wants to do what is best for the project so is often conflicted and led astray.

The only way for the project manager to truly solve this problem is to understand the nature of quality.  Most project managers understand the triple constraints of project management, which are scope, time, and resources.  Note there, that I said scope, time, and resources not scope, time, and cost.  This is because cost is really not accurate and complete.  It is solely monetary.  Resources, on the other hand, include everything you have to complete the project with (e.g. Money, personnel, facilities, equipment, etc.).  Hopefully, that makes sense.

However, I digress so, let’s get back to quality.  In the end, quality is quite simply the product of scope, time, and resources.  What this means is that quality is delivering the project scope, within the required amount of time using the resources allotted for the project.  That’s it.  No more and no less.

So, then, what of these conversations about over delivering on customers’ expectations and such?  Quite simply, if it is not part of the scope that was agreed to and signed by the customer, be it an internal customer or external customer, then this is simply gold-plating of the scope, which almost always leads to schedule and cost overruns.  In other words, gold-plating is bad.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that everyone that says “hey, if we did this it would make for a hell of a lot better product” is out to sink your project.  However, there are proper ways to do it.  If such options appear and deserve real consideration then they should be brought to the team as a whole, including the steering committee, and the impacts to the triple constraints should be evaluated.  Ultimately, you will have three choices.  They are create a change order and accept the impact to the current project, place the enhancement on a product roadmap, or forget it all together.  Even evaluations of possible changes cost money.

In the end, it is important for the team to feel like they have a say in the project.  Additionally, as a project manager, you want to be approachable so that people will come to you with ideas that they have or problems they may find.  However, random changes to the scope of a project does not lead to a higher quality product only a more expensive one or one delivered late, not to mention, the customer may not like the idea anyhow no matter how cool you think it is.

Your path to business success.