Development Cooperation Handbook/Designing and Executing Projects/Project Quality

The 9 Topic Areas Of Project Management Knowledge

Quality is one of the 9 topic areas of project management knowledge.

Quality Management is the process of making sure that products or services are made to consistently high standards. It is achieved through a set of actions of the general management function which determines the quality policy, aims and responsibilities and realises them within the framework of quality by planning, control, ensuring and improving the quality.

The application of a quality management system in managing a process to achieve maximum beneficiary satisfaction at the lowest overall cost to the organization while continuing to improve the process.

The professional quality of the job done depends to a very great extend to the human quality of the persons who associate themselves in the organizations and to the communication climate within the organization. There is a formal difference between organizational types and organizational structures: but really makes the difference is the way the organizational identity is constructed and preservation and the cohesiveness of its teams.

The Project Quality Management has to plan and execute all those "activities of the performing organization that determine quality policies, objectives, and responsibilities so that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken": the main target is to establish a "quality management system" containing processes and procedures of "quality planing, quality assurance, and quality control" (comp. PMBOK3, p. 179)