How To Create A Quality Management Plan

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.

Who Should Be Involved In Creating a Quality Management Plan?

The short answer: Everyone.

Quality management is central to the project lifecycle—it starts at the beginning, with everyone owning quality.

But there are a few key players who should be involved, regardless of how your team is structured:

Test Engineer

Teams may have a specific test engineer role, which should also be involved at the beginning. This role is incredibly valuable to have in any quality management plan, notably for detailed requirements management. If you do not have this role on your team, you should lobby to have one.

Test engineers are going to see things that other roles on the team may naturally not see. This role is naturally detailed, while also keeping the bigger picture of the full end-user journey in mind. At this beginning stage of a project, test engineers can help define acceptance criteria for when a feature may be "complete."

Project Stakeholders

The value of quality management does not stop with the test engineers. During initial requirements gathering and definition, it is important that everyone on a project team, including stakeholders, participates in requirements gathering and definition.

This thread of collaboration is carried through development, integration of test cases, stakeholder acceptance, and even user feedback collection and prioritization.

Example Quality Management Plan

This quality management plan example applies best to software development projects with small teams.

In a software quality management plan, here are a few sections you could include:

Project quality measurements: the things you're measuring and how you define their quality
Key responsibilities: a list of people and who's doing what
Implementation checklist: tasks to make sure you're implementing your quality plan
Requirements quality check: a log where you record specific requirements and check off various quality management and testing activities
Target device list: a record of all your target devices where your software quality criteria should be met

You might list these all on a word document or in separate tabs in a spreadsheet, or in your own work management system. In my sample, I have them as separate tabs in a spreadsheet (sample is available for download in DPM Membership)

quality management plan infographic

Example components of a quality management plan: quality measurements, key responsibilities, an implementation checklist, requirements check, and target device list. You can find my sample with filled-in examples in DPM Membership