Weekly Cup of Joe # 4 – Quality Planning
Whether you are freshly minted into the QMS position or you are a founder of a Startup or a product manager with a new project… your strategy requires QMS oversight.
QMS Joe is here to guide you through the plethora of information and support you with handy tips & tricks to streamline your way to compliance.
Quality Planning - Learning to Think Ahead
To turn your ideas into the success you must cultivate the skill of looking one move ahead…whether you are good in playing chess or not. Every project should have a quality plan. In reality, very few do.
Why is quality planning important?
Not planning the work means you are constantly retracing your steps instead of moving from one area to the next, you waste time trying to remember what to do and trying to make decisions on the fly. Without strong quality planning, a project carries an increased risk that you won't be satisfied with the results.
Things go much more smoothly if you take some time to consider what you need to do and plan the path for doing it.
Is producing a quality plan a complex job?
Producing a quality plan is not complex. The development of a Project Quality Plan should be a team process, that depends as much on communicating information as it does on planning.
Once everyone understands the ultimate reason for what they are doing, people are on the same page and working toward the same goals.
The Quality plan is not just a specific and detailed listing of all quality requirements and standards, use Quality Planning to develop awareness of potential quality issues. Based on this awareness it’s much easier to prepare plans and actions to counter any weaknesses or deficiencies in the project execution…thus ensuring that all quality standards are met effectively.
What are the main elements of a good Quality Plan?
A good Project Quality Plan is defined as a set of activities planned at the beginning of the project that helps achieve Quality in the project being executed.
It includes main points like:
- The project’s activities and the relations between them
- Development strategy
- Milestones clearly identified and dated
- Concrete and measurable criteria for project activities and milestones completion Project schedule
- Responsible for each activity
- Resources for each project activity – human, equipment, material, financial
- Quality plan should be regularly updated as project activities proceed
- Quality plan should be available for relevant persons
- Quality plan and every update should be approved and re-approved
Learning to Think Ahead
Having uncovered the quality issues, be sure you have a mechanism in place to fix the problems. There must be some follow-up process to allocate fixes to particular people and ensure they actually make the changes. This implies that time must be built into the schedule for rework following quality events.
There is an overhead in undertaking quality checks, but this is offset by not having to fix things further down the line. Inevitably, the later you find a problem, the longer it takes to fix.
A plan puts the structure in place that allows the Quality Management efforts to gain traction and produce real results.
Now consider that the effectiveness of a QMS software impacts how well the whole organization meets customer expectations. qmsWrapper offers a full circle of QMS, Quality managers with little experience or knowledge of the supported Standards, can easily step into the role and effectively start.
That’s the true benefit of a quality management system.
