We all like to think we do a quality job on projects, but in reality what ‘quality’ means to one person is not necessarily the same as what ‘quality’ means to another. So it is important to establish at the beginning of a project how you will manage to a quality result. Quality Management!
Luckily, creating a sustainable, robust approach to managing quality in a project environment isn’t difficult, if you gather the right tools around you. Many enterprise project management tools even give you the data to be able to assess the results as you carry out the project. Here are five tools for quality management that you could use on your projects.
Checklists
OK, calling checklists a ‘tool’ might be stretching it a bit. Checklists are typically tables in documents or spreadsheets with a list of questions. You review the questions and tick off your responses. It’s like a to do list for quality.
Checklists have had a significant impact in improving quality in surgical operations: the World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist almost halved the number of deaths in hospitals piloting the checklist. Checklists are also used in the cockpits of aircraft before takeoff, but in our experience at Ten Six we don’t see them that often in a project management environment.
Checklists can be used to show that a number of steps have been carried out before the deliverable is released to the business user.
Histograms
Histograms are what you used to call bar charts in school. They are used for recording numerical information, such as the number of users trained on a new IT system each week, resource hours spent on fixing problems each day, or the number of complaints from customers per month.
In quality terms, histograms represent data in a very visual format. They are a good way for taking numbers out of an enterprise project management tool and putting them into a format that every stakeholder (even the busy ones) can understand at first glance. They are particularly useful for trends, so if you want to demonstrate that quality is improving, you can use a histogram to display that complaints are going down.
Pareto Charts
Back in 1906, Vilfredo Pareto commented that 80% of Italian land was owned by 20% of the people. Joseph M. Juran crystallized this into the Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. Effectively, this says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In quality terms, that means that if you focus the project team’s efforts on fixing those 20% of causes, you’ll have the most impact in improving quality.
Pareto charts show data sets in size order, so you can instantly see which cause (or other variable) has the greatest impact. You could apply this to project management processes, such as reducing the number of business cases that get rejected by looking at the reasons why they are completed incorrectly and then providing training or more detailed guidance about those factors that rank the highest. You can also use them for assessing the quality of project deliverables, for example, tracking the main causes of customer complaints about your software so that you focus on fixing those first.
Flow Charts
Hurray for sticky notes! Flow charting is a fun aspect of project management. Stick a few sheets of flip chart paper on the wall and then cover them with sticky notes and arrows to map out a process.
Understanding the steps of the process can help diagnose where quality issues are occurring. Again, this could be with the project management processes or the project deliverables themselves. Drawing out the change management process might identify why changes constantly get rejected, even when they are good ideas. Plotting the customer service process might identify the hand-offs between teams and work out why it takes so long to deal with a customer complaint.
Scatter Diagrams
Scatter diagrams help illustrate cause and effect, so they are a good tool if you have lots of data and want to compare variables. For example, do higher paid project managers actually get better success rates on their projects? At a portfolio level you could plot salaries against whether projects were completed to the required criteria and compare. Of course, you might want to start with something less controversial! You could look at whether your focus group participants rank the most feature-risk software prototype as the best one. You could ask them to rank their views on the software, and you’d expect to see that as you showed them prototypes with more features, they would rank the tool more highly. A scatter chart will show if that is actually the case.
Some large programs or projects may even have a quality manager assigned to them, or your Project Management Office may have a quality manager working to support all projects in the organization. Either way, ensuring projects deliver a quality outcome in a quality way is something that all project managers should aspire to. There are a number of tools to help you, as we’ve seen, so the first challenge for you is picking the right one!