What Is Quality Management?
Quality management all comes down to how you make sure everything you create in a project is of value and maintained well. It may be seen throughout all phases and roles of a project if implemented well.
To understand quality management, we also need to understand what “quality” refers to. There are two key aspects of quality management:
Product Quality
This is your actual, tangible product. It could be the app you have built, the design prototypes your designer team built, or even the code documentation your developers wrote.
Process Quality
As project managers, we are responsible for creating and maintaining processes. However, in the context of quality management, we must also consider the quality and impact our processes have on our team’s ability to deliver results. Quality here might be measured by metrics such as velocity.
Why Is Quality Management Important?
There are many benefits of performing and supporting quality management in a typical project.
Some of these benefits include:
- 1. Deliver a Quality Product
When you are practicing quality management, the actual results of what your team has created will be significantly better and more stable. Your end-users will be happier and more satisfied with what you were able to ship.
- 2. Decrease Overhead
By integrating quality management throughout your work, quality is present at every step. This means that there is less room for error because the process, plan, and alignment is stable and may have built-in contingencies. There are fewer unknowns, which opens up more space for your team to create great results.
- 3. Increase the Delivery Pace of your Team
Results are met on a healthier cadence, which creates trust with your users and stakeholders. Your team becomes known for quality, consistent output, and can be trusted to continue to do so.
- 4. Increase Collaboration and Review
Because quality is part of every phase and everyone’s role, all team members help ensure the project is of the highest quality. Developers may engage in test-driven-development. Stakeholders may speak into defining acceptance criteria and what acceptable quality means. Test engineer roles focus on exploratory testing and finding edge cases.