What are the quality management processes?

The quality management function of the project can be described as:

• Assuring conformance to mutually agreed to expectations.

• Assuring conformance to requirements and specifications.

• Assuring conformance to ALL the characteristics that allow it to satisfy the function intended.

The transfer of initially assumed needs to planned ones is the critical aspect of quality management in the project context. According to the Project Management Institute's Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), project quality management considers three major processes: quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control.

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At this stage of quality planning our major goal is to find the regulations and specifications suitable for the current project and to find ways for implementing and introducing these standards into our project cycle. It is important to remember that we should concentrate on the quality standards for processes as well as the final products. Generally, modern tendencies of quality management make us shift our attention more and more from checking the quality of the final product (inspection) to predicting changes of quality in the processes (prevention).

In order to carry out our quality planning process, we have to get all the documents describing the standards and regulations we are going to use (the quality policy of our company, standard descriptions, etc.) as well as the documentation describing the requirements to the project product (scope statement) and then use the quality tools (flowchart, costbenefit analysis, simulations) that allow us to visualize and predict the results of applying the standards and regulations to our project scope.

The quality assurance processes are carried out in order to assure that our project product complies with accepted standards and regulations. Quality assurance should be carried out throughout the project both internally (for the company, project team, etc.) and externally (for the customer). In many cases, the quality assurance function can, but not necessarily should, be carried out by a special quality assurance department of the company.

Quality control processes monitor the final results of the project— both management results and product results—in order to see how much they correspond to the standards planned and what can be done to improve the results to meet the standards. Quality control processes include both inspection and prevention, but as we said above, the tendency in modern quality management is shifting toward prevention in order to reduce the overall cost of quality. The quality control function can be carried out by a special quality control department, but this is not a rule in modern quality management practices. It is becoming more a function of the producing units of the company, the idea of "being your own inspector".

In quality control, the rest of the quality management tools such as Pareto diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, statistical sampling, and control charts are used.