In today's blog, we will be discussing the importance of project quality management and how important it is to achieve project success in IT. We will start by talking about what exactly project quality management is, giving a good definition for it, and then moving into some of the reasons why it is so important.
Project quality management is something that in and of itself is hard to define. It is more of a knowledge area than something that can be easily defined but we can state what the purpose of project quality management is and that might help you get a good beginning understanding of it. “The purpose of project quality management is to ensure that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken.” (Source) Something that must be understood by you, the project manager, is that ultimately it is the main customer of the project that decides what quality is on the project that you are working on for them.
This is one of the things that makes project quality management hard, the fact that you have to rely on someone else to tell you what quality looks like. As you are building the project however, you should have already had discussions with the project owner to decide on what quality looks like to them so that way you can adjust the project accordingly if something goes wrong. This will help you be able to still deliver a quality product.
The Importance of Project Quality Management
Now that we have the “definition” of project quality management and we understand it a little bit better, we can talk more about why it is important. It may seem obvious at first that this is important but it is always better to take a deeper look and really understand why it is even more important that you might actually think.
In general you might think of most projects as something not super significant to the world but important enough to provide some value. Well this is not the case in a lot of scenarios. Software is such a massive part of the world now that there are a lot of systems in the world that if they fail, then the government that relies on that system might fail as well. There are a lot of projects in the world that are life and death types of scenarios and if the project is not up to a certain standard, then it could mean disastrous consequences. Let’s look at an example to help us get a better understanding of this.
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Say that there is a hospital that needs a new system created because the old was insufficient to handle the amount of people that were starting to come in the door. They need it quickly and they need it to be very high quality because keeping track of patients, medicines, which doctors and nurses are assigned to certain patients, etc. It is a big deal that the company hired for this project is not only qualified for the job but also is capable of seeing the need for high quality.
If the company selected for this project fails to see the need for quality and is not able to deliver a high quality project, then there will be multiple groups of people that suffer. First of all the patients will suffer because they might not be able to get the kind of treatment or as fast of treatment as they need. The nurses and doctors will also suffer in this scenario because there will not be consistency in keeping track of patients and medicines. This allows for patients to slip through the cracks of the system and they might miss out on getting the help that they need. It becomes a cycle of mishandling patients all because the system that was delivered did not live up to the quality that was promised or thought to have been promised.
Now on the other hand, if the company selected for this job sees the value in the work that they are being asked to do and understands the need for quality then they will be able to actually deliver a quality product. This would not only help out the hospital in so many ways but might actually be crucial in saving lives.
The Importance of Project Quality Management in IT
This section will kind of go hand in hand with the last section but will focus a little bit more on the IT side of project quality management. We have already spent some time talking about this on a software level but I wanted to take it even deeper with another example to finish off the discussion on this.
Software Engineering teams are a pretty crucial part of banking nowadays because most banking is done online, whether it be through an app or through a website. Software Engineers are needed to develop and also maintain these apps and websites. Since they are such an important part of banks, it is assumed that some of the projects they are working on are pretty important not only to the banks but also to the customers that are invested in that bank.
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Imagine that there is a new software project underway at a bank to create a new application that customers can download onto their phones instead of just the website that they had formerly only been using. This app will allow users to view how much money is in their account, manage the money, remote deposit checks, etc. It will just allow them to have greater control over their money and in a more timely fashion. This project will require the team in charge to have a clear understanding on what quality truly means to the bank and to customers. For example, let’s assume that the project was completed on time and delivered to the customers without any significant problems off of the bat. But after a few weeks there started to be some outages on the server and the application goes down more and more frequently. Soon you start to get lots of calls and complaints to the IT department about the failure of the new app and how the customers cannot access the money that they entrusted the bank with. This is a huge failure on the part of the software engineering team because it is pretty clear that they focused only on getting the product out on time and they did not perform project quality management to the best degree that they could have.
This kind of failure leads to distrust from customers, anger, monetary losses, possible even some people losing their jobs. Project Quality Management is a very important thing to understand and get right because if something is not delivered with quality, then it might just fail out in the real world.
I hope that as you have read this you have started to get a grasp on how important this topic is. While there is a lot more that could be said about this, this is a good starter on the topic and allows you to get some of the scope on this.
Sources:
Schwalbe, Kathy. Information Technology Project Management. Available from: Yuzu, (9th Edition). Cengage Learning US, 2023.
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