Powerful Tools and Techniques for Project Quality

We emphasized the value and importance of planning your quality management system. In this section, we highlight ten of the most powerful quality-focused tools and techniques that you want to consider during your planning efforts, document in your Quality Management Plan, and then implement during the execution of your project.

• Requirements traceability matrix—A simple, yet often neglected technique to help control scope, expectations, and quality is the use of a requirements traceability matrix. The traceability matrix provides a documented link between the original set of approved requirements, any interim deliverable, all testing (verification) methods employed, and the final work product. This technique helps to ensure that the final work product(s) satisfy the targeted requirements and that all those requirements were properly validated.
• Checklists—Checklists are simple, yet powerful. They clearly capture and communicate the quality standards that the targeted work package must meet, and they improve project team productivity. They are flexible—separate checklists can be developed for each work product or project management process. They provide a mechanism to capture the lessons learned from past projects. They provide a mechanism to document the verification performed on the work package.
• Templates—The development and use of templates provides a way to both communicate and control the use of certain standards and to help standardize the resulting work packages and procedures across projects. In addition, templates can capture lessons-learned information (mostly updates and improvements based on prior experiences), provide guidance, and greatly improve the productivity level of a project team.
• Reviews—Reviews are a key technique for ensuring quality and managing expectations, and they can take many forms. The principle here is to plan for the review-feedback-correction cycle on most, if not all, of your key deliverables. Common examples of reviews are peer reviews, inspections, client walkthroughs, audits, testing cycles, sprint/iteration reviews, and milestone reviews.
• Completion criteria—This starts during project definition with defining the acceptance criteria for the project, and it continues for each deliverable and work assignment. Answer this question in advance for each deliverable and work assignment: “How will we know when it is done?” Understanding the completion criteria upfront increases productivity and avoids much of the rework that can occur when quality requirements are not understood upfront.
• Small work packages—You’ve seen this one before, too. In addition to reasons previously mentioned—more accurate estimates and better control—small work packages provide a finer level of quality control, too. By establishing completeness and correctness completion criteria for each work package and verifying each work package along the way, we provide many more opportunities to detect quality discrepancies as early in the project as possible. By doing this, we can take corrective actions when the costs are lower and time is still available.
• Independent audits—The use of an independent auditor is another specific example of the review technique mentioned earlier. The power of this technique is in establishing the quality criteria in advance and making the project accountable to an outside entity. NoteMake sure the work and responsibilities associated with the project quality system are reflected in the WBS and project schedule.
• Standards—In many situations, specific quality standards either do not exist or have not been formally developed. In these cases, it is my recommendation that you establish project standards upfront that will be captured in both work assignments and quality checklists. And if at all possible, facilitate this standards development with the project team—you’ll be glad you did.
• V method—The V method is a term used for a common validation and verification approach that ensures that there is a validation and verification step for every deliverable and interim deliverable created. While this method is traditionally associated with waterfall project approaches, the principles do apply and are used in agile approaches too. An overview of this method is illustrated in Figure 15.1. The left side of the “V” notes each targeted deliverable and the right side of the “V” lists the verification method used for each deliverable directly across. This method enables us to check quality along the way rather than waiting to the end to discover there are quality defects.

• Quality Management Plan—This is the document that describes and communicates the project’s quality management system to the project stakeholders. Specifically, the Quality Management Plan should address most of these questions:
  • What is the scope of the quality management system?
  • How will either internal or external quality-based groups be involved?
  • What quality standards must be met?
  • What approaches, tools, and techniques will be employed?
  • How will the standards be enforced?
  • How will quality defects or discrepancies be tracked and reported?
  • How will each deliverable be validated?
  • What are the expected costs?

Powerful Quality Strategies

In addition to the powerful quality tools and techniques we reviewed earlier, there are five other key strategies related to managing project quality that we need to discuss:

• Use customer-focused project approaches—This might be self-evident by now, but utilize project approaches that accomplish the following:
  • Fully engage the customer throughout the project life cycle.
  • Partner the project team with the targeted customers.
  • Enable the customer to provide feedback on “solution-like” deliverables as soon as possible.
  • Emphasize prevention and early detection of quality defects.
  • Popular, modern-day project approaches and techniques that fall into this category include the following:
    • Iterative development
    • Quality function deployment (QFD)
    • Prototyping
    • Computer simulation
    • Agile development
    • Scenario and use case development
    • Storyboarding
• Take customer’s perspective—From the development of requirements to the testing approach, make sure to take the customer’s perspective. In particular, the testing environment needs to simulate the real-world customer environment to the greatest extent possible. Without this approach, your verification procedures are incomplete at best and misleading at their worst.
• Pre-verify deliverables—To better manage client expectations, including confidence in the project team, make sure to conduct an internal quality check on any deliverable that will be reviewed by the client. Make sure to schedule these internal verification steps, too.
• Focus on the people—There is no better quality management technique than to have people who are good at what they do, who take pride in their work, and who are focused on the customer experience. The project management processes of staffing, managing, and leading a team are key project quality factors.
• Leverage expertise—A great way to deal with unanticipated project quality issues is to structure the team with one or more mentors (or coaches). Because many organizations do not have an effective way to formally pass along the lessons from the past, this strategy is an effective way to leverage the wisdom that lies within the social fabric of the organization. The two positions that are most needed are a mentor for the project manager and a technical mentor for the technical aspects of the project. In many cases, the technical mentor might actually provide the QA function for the technical deliverables.
• Prioritize testing—This is part of taking the customer perspective approach, and it also incorporates the importance of understanding where your key risks lie with the targeted work product. In situations where testing resources or schedules are limited, it is imperative to verify the high-risk areas first.