Essay: Project Quality Management Components.

What is Project Quality Management?

Discuss About The Journal Of Software Engineering Applications?

Project quality management is the application of skills, tools, techniques and knowledge to ensure that a project is complete and successful (Munier, 2013). A project is basically a contractual assignment that is given to a group of team members to be completed within a certain time period. In a project, there are certain specific common constraints that face project team member which are: the project scope, project time period, the budget and the resources to be used to complete the project. This means that for a project management to be successful, the project managers or team members have to achieve the objectives set (produce the expected product or service in terms of quality, quantity, physical appearances etc.) within the constraints (Basu, 2016). Therefore, for that to be possible, project quality management has to be used to guide the project activities and members. Project Quality management can be said to be the process of controlling, planning, directing and organizing all the activities that are directly responsible for developing and improving the project quality or rather the quality of the project’s end result (Kerzner, 2013). Project quality management involves operations that work towards ensuring that the project will satisfy the expected needs. This operations may include identifying and modifying activities like: management activities, objectives, quality policies, roles and responsibilities (Levin, 2014). The project manager, business owners and stakeholders ought to ensure that these activities are guided and implemented towards improving the project quality as well as that of the end result or product.

In a project management process, there are four major components which are: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement (Tinnaluri, 2016). These four components are to be used by the project managers by coordinating them with other activities being carried out by the project team members to ensure project completion and success. Project quality management also refers to ensuring that all activities that are being conducted by the project team members are done according to the rules and regulations and towards the common goal and objective. Therefore, the project managers should ensure that the team members have strong skills, technical knowledge and ability and are great experts at their field of operations (Liberatore et al, 2013). This will certainly ensure that the project quality is of no question. However, for such a coordination to be manageable, the project managers should develop and implement a quality management plan which is basically a schedule or an outline of what requirements are needed and relevant for the achievement of the quality standards. This means that the business owners and stakeholders have to identify the quality standards while the project managers and team members determine the techniques, procedures and methods of achieving those standards.

Components of Project Quality Management

For global project teams, the project quality management plan can be a very difficult process to develop and implement. This is simply because the team members, stakeholders and business owners are technically in different parts of the world. Global teams means that the team members have a common goal and objective at the end of the project, but are placed in different countries or continents in the world. In such a scenario, there are very many differences between the members which makes any project management plan possible or easy to execute. However, with an agreed project management plan before the project begins, a global project team can achieve the quality management of a project as well as that of the product itself.

As mentioned earlier, quality management typically involves four components. These components are capable of managing a project quality or rather they are used to determine the quality of any project. For a global project team to be successful in any project, these components must be identified and procedures developed and implemented to achieve them. The following are the components:

Quality is a characteristic or feature of something. Project quality planning is the identification and determination of the quality standards that are relevant to a project. Also, it involves the identification and development of the procedures, techniques and methods that can be implemented to achieve those quality standards. In this phase, the project goals and objectives are set, project deliverables or requirements listed, policies and procedures identified and roles and responsibilities divided among the team members. This is one of the most important phases of a project management plan. By conducting this phase, the project team members will be working towards achieving a common goal. Therefore, this component should be communicated effectively to the stakeholders and business owners simply because they are the ones to determine the project quality in the end. In addition to that, their participation is needed and important to ensure that all the project requirements are listed before it begins.

This phase involves the analysis and evaluation of the project performance frequently to determine whether the project will meet its expectations or not. However, this components involves the satisfaction of the project quality standards only. This phase is used to track the project’s progression to determine that it is on the right track, i.e. towards achieving the quality standards of the customer. In other words, quality assurance is used to identify the project failure, mistake or problems and determine the corrective measure to be taken (Nicholas et al, 2017). To add to that, quality assurance ensures that the corrective measures fall towards achieving the quality standards for the project. Therefore, quality assurance can be said to be a project process that helps in the improvement of the activities and processes conducted during a project execution to ensure that the quality standards of the project are met.

Global Project Teams and Project Quality Management

This is a component that is involved in a project’s final phases, mostly after a project is completed. It inspects and conducts project reviews with an aim of ensuring its success. In other words, quality control involves monitoring the project activities, procedures and schedule to ensure that they comply with the quality standards set to be achieved. In addition to that, this phase identifies possible problems (in relation to quality control or quality plan) and devices solutions to the problems. However, if the solutions fail to meet the expected standards, other alternatives are used until the quality standards of the project as well as the end product are met. Fundamentally, the quality control phase ensures the elimination of unsatisfactory project performance, in regard with quality.

In general terms, quality improvement involves finding new or better ways and methods to make the quality of a product or service better. Project quality improvement includes introducing better resources to carry out a project. This means involves better qualifies, skilled and knowledgeable team members in the project (Schwalbe, 2015). Also, it involves including strong experts into the project. This phase ensures that the project team members have got what it takes to produce the expected quality of project. During this phase, the project managers and users are required to interact with other project managers with an aim of learning anything that can improve the quality of the project in any way. However, this will limit the people involved only to quality related information. According to Simona et al, 2011, this is a component that is fundamental in a global project members because they are all required to participate and share any information or knowledge that can improve the quality of a project. On the other hand, it can be a very beneficial aspect because in a global team, different people with different views and knowledge on quality are involved.

For a global team to achieve project quality management, they must work together in creating an effective and efficient quality management plan to use during the project implementation. This simply means that the business owners, stakeholder, project managers and the other project team members have to rely on each other for information and support. Furthermore, they all have to let go the differences between them to achieve the expected quality standards of the project. However, they have to need to ensure that all the components listed above are identified and procedures for their achievement determined (Alami, 2016). There are challenges that face global project team members that should also be identified.

Conclusion

In a global project, the management of any project becomes a difficult task for the project managers because of the cultural differences among the members. Due to these differences, there are additional challenges, e.g. with communication. The different attitudes and behaviors caused by cultural differences increase the possibility of problems arising during the project executing. Furthermore, the cultural diversities increases the possibilities of project failure which is caused by the failure of the team members to adapt to the culture or behavior that is meant to complete the project successfully (Alami, 2016). In that case, the project quality management plan creation becomes a challenge for the whole team as well.

In case of an IT project, the cultural differences may involve operations like different ways of handling and using technology to produce a product. Therefore, for global teams, effective and efficient technology should be used but should not influence the cultural practices of the members or the users.

In a global team, there are different team members from different countries. These countries certainly have different technological advancement status which brings inequality in a project. Therefore, in a case of IT project, the team members are likely going to underrate or underestimate the ideas and opinions of a member whose origin is a less developed country (Lima et al, 2014). This differences can cause problems for the members which creates a non-conducive environment for project success, e.g. disputes and arguments involved. This also affects the creation of an effective project quality management plan that should guide the team.

In a global project team, the members are always very far apart which means that the management process becomes a challenge. This also means that there are no meetings to be held on a regular basis (either for update of the project status or assurance of the project’s track) like in a local project. The long distance between the members make communication difficult. These teams mostly communicate through emails, Skype, phone calls, video calls among others. However, these also are challenges because of the time differences in the world. All of these challenges have the capability of affecting the creation and implementation of a project quality management plan which becomes a challenge to the project itself.

Different countries have different project management structures, techniques and methods. Therefore, for a global team, this becomes a challenge because every member would think that their structure is better or more effective that the others (Gulesin et al, 2015). This means that each member will want their structure to be implemented in the project. This challenge is capable of causing arguments and disputes among the members which will affect the project implementation, performance and success.

This is in relation to the laws that govern a country. A global project will have a specific goal and objective for every member no matter their location. However, different countries have different laws and regulations governing certain specific projects, products or services. According to ul Haq et al, 2011), there are chances that the rules and regulations of the countries will go against those of the project objective. This means that it becomes a challenge for a team member to comply with the country laws or focus on achieving the project objective. For instance, laws that govern quality regulations of a product or service.

In case of an IT project, legal matters may involve things like laws governing the technology use in the country. In this case, the global project team member should not be involved with any activity or operation that will break the country’s law, especially concerning use of the technology.

This involves the project managers and the other team members recognizing and respecting the culture of every team member involved in the project. Also, it involves being aware of the differences between the members, e.g. being aware of the cultural celebrations like national and religious holidays. To add to that, culture recognition include also recognition of the different ethnic groups and races among the project team members (Aarseth et al, 2011). Through this, each team member will certainly feel respected and valuable despite their differences with others. Also, it will help the members work together hence encouraging team work and better understanding.

With the long distances between the members, great differences in time zones is involved. This causes communication difficulties and hence no effective communication structure or process. This basically means that sometimes it is challenging to conduct a meeting or set up a meeting time for everyone in the team spread over the globe. The solution for this can be to come up with a way of coordinating the members and knowing the time suitable for each member to meet, e.g. by using the TimeAndDate.com which is a world clock that also has a meeting planner tool.

Effective leadership or management team can solve most of the challenges involved in a global project team. However, most of the challenges that may be solved by this include: issues to do with different management structures and techniques, technological differences, legal matters among others (Aarseth et al, 2013). A good project manager will ensure that all members are comfortable with carrying out any project activity without breaking the country laws.

Conclusion

For every project, the quality characteristics of the project or product are defined by the business owners and stakeholders. However, project managers and the project team members have to implement the procedures and methods of achieving those quality features demanded by the client. The four components of project quality management plan (quality control, assurance, planning and improvement) should be used to achieve the quality standards in every project. From project initiation stage to the completion stage, these four aspects should be checked and kept on track. On the other hand, global project teams are usually faced by a number of challenges that affect the quality of a project or product. These teams should hinder some of the solutions discussed above to solve the related challenges.

References

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