Last Thursday I had the chance to attend a Webinar about quality in projects (see my note on Webinars). Like the other sessions, more than 60 people were attending the event, but this time the teacher used the full power of the webinar tool and animated a very interactive session, by asking questions, doing online polls and making exercises. Here are the main topics presented during this webinar.

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The first topic of the webinar was to define Quality. The answers provided by the participants were all different, and there are several definitions of Quality, depending on the scope you're talking about : product quality, project quality or quality in project management.

For products, quality is commonly defined by "preventing errors out of the hands of the customer". But then, there are several ways to achieve this goal. The most basic way is to use inspection to remove all bad products. But the teacher dynamically proved us that inspection is very limited and subject to human errors : she asked every participant to count the number of times the letter "f" was present in a six-lines text... the answers were all different! Therefore, this method is not efficient, and expensive. A good way to envisage quality is not to punish people doing errors, but to limit their possibilities to do errors. Thus, we should consider quality as a preventive process and not as a reactive one.

For projects, the concept of quality is linked to the ability of meeting the project objectives in terms of scope, time and budget : doing all needed deliverables, in line with the schedule and the planned costs. Three processes describe in the PMBOK quality management in projects : Quality planning (defining the objectives of quality management in this project), Quality Assurance (systematic actions, like quality audits, that provide confidence that the product or service will meet the relevant quality standards) and Quality Control (monitoring the project results, for instance by inspection, and launch action plans to eliminate the causes of unsatisfactory performance).

For project management, the concept of quality is linked to the ability of the organization to use the same project methodology, share the same objectives and integrate all projects in the global strategy.

But in practice... how can I integrate quality in my projects?

The teacher took the example of the Jefferson Memorial that showed quality issues in order to explain the way of proceeding. First of all, in face of a given issue, the objective is to find the root cause, i.e. the cause on which you should act in order to improve the situation. For this, you should ask you the "why" question, as your child would do to understand something...
- why is the memorial so often cleaned?
- why are there so many birds around that building that justify so much cleanings?
- why are there so many spiders on the building that explain the number of birds?
- why are there so many insects on the building that cause the increase of the spider population?
- why is the building more enlightened than the others that brings so many insects there?
By asking the "why" question, you should come to the root cause, and then find the right way to solve the issue.

When the cause is diagnosed, you should remedy the cause, measure the effects, and finally replicate the results.

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