Introduction
The Quality Management Plan is an integral part of any project management plan. The purpose of the Quality Management Plan is to describe how quality will be managed throughout the lifecycle of the project. It also includes the processes and procedures for ensuring quality planning, assurance, and control are all conducted. All stakeholders should be familiar with how quality will be planned, assured, and controlled.
Quality Management Approach
This section of the Quality Management Plan describes the approach the organization will use for managing quality throughout the project’s life cycle. Quality must always be planned into a project in order to prevent unnecessary rework, waste, cost, and time. Quality should also be considered from both a product and process perspective. The organization may already have a standardized approach to quality, however, whether it is standard or not, the approach must be defined and communicated to all project stakeholders.
Quality Requirements/Standards
This part of the Quality Management Plan should describe how the project team and/or quality group will identify and document the quality requirements and standards. Additionally, there should also be an explanation of how the project will demonstrate compliance with those identified quality standards. The quality standards and requirements should include both the product and processes.
Quality Assurance
Here the Quality Management Plan should explain how you will define and document the process for auditing the quality requirements and results from quality control measurements in order to ensure that quality standards and operational definitions are used. This section should also document the actual quality assurance metrics used for this project.
Quality Control
In this section the Quality Management Plan describes how you will define and document the process for monitoring and recording the results of executing the quality activities to assess performance and recommend necessary changes. Quality control applies to the project’s product as opposed to its processes. It should include what the acceptable standards and/or performance are for the product and how these measurements will be conducted.
Quality Control Measurements
This section of the Quality Management Plan should contain a sample or useable table/log to be used in taking quality measurements and comparing them against standards/requirements. These forms may be found in many different styles or formats. The most important aspect of this log is to provide documentation of the findings in the Quality Management Plan. If actual measurements do not meet the standards or requirements then some action must be taken. This may be done in regularly scheduled project status meetings or as necessary throughout the project lifecycle.