Quality Assurance
The Quality Assurance discipline ensures that the project meets quality requirements. The products meet requirements and the customers accept these products, preferably without significant defect repair. They are also fit for purpose. In other words, they fulfill the customer’s needs. Processes also comply with standards without waste and bureaucracies. Finally, the overall product meets the project’s acceptance criteria.
Quality assurance is, by definition, formal and independent. An independent team audits quality control measurements. This independent team can then ensure stakeholders that the project will meet quality targets. In other words, it ensures that the team develops products, processes, and projects according to fit-for-purpose requirements.
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The Reason to Perform Quality Assurance
The Quality Assurance management discipline ensures that quality requirements are met. Additionally, it helps to use quality management resources more efficiently.
It is often cheaper to prevent defects than to correct them. In other words, the costs of quality nonconformance are often proportionally greater than the costs of quality conformance. Consequently, project teams should spend more on preventing and inspecting defects. Thus, they can spend less on correcting those defects.
The Quality Assurance discipline allows senior management to be more confident that the project has the right processes and delivers suitable products. In this way, they use their resources more wisely.
Finally, quality assurance may help the team deliver products without defects. Furthermore, it helps to increase stakeholder satisfaction and trust. As a result, organizations deliver more value with their resources.
Tailor Quality Assurance to the Context
Project teams should deliver within standards. The Assurance discipline is a management tool to provide confidence that projects comply with these standards. However, managing quality requires time and resources. As a consequence, the team must take measures to ensure quality consistently.
During quality planning, the project management plan prepares a quality management plan. This plan will clarify the product, process, and project quality requirements. Moreover, it will clarify how the project will manage quality. In other words, it will define the quality management processes, tools, techniques, roles, and responsibilities. In summary, the quality management plan establishes a common understanding of the meaning of quality and quality management.
Concurrently, the quality management plan should be aligned with existing corporate or program quality assurance policies. If the existing quality assurance policies are incomplete or unrealistic, the project management team can tailor the existing policies and introduce new project-specific standards.
Tailoring the assurance approach can help ensure that the project uses its resources efficiently. In other words, the team must avoid quality management costs that are not necessary.
The Quality Assurance Role
Quality control plays a key role. Specifically, it inspects products and processes to assess if they comply with standards. Moreover, it repairs elements that do not comply.
Therefore, the quality control process is a vital quality management pillar. Without it, the team would struggle to validate the project’s products. Moreover, it would be difficult to accept the project. Identically, quality control enables quality assurance. Quality control measurements are the key input of quality audits.