Quality Management and Communications Plan

06 July 2007

In this article we’ll describe how to undertake Quality Management and creating a detailed “Communications Plan”.

How to undertake Quality Management

Quality is defined as “the level of conformance of the produced deliverables to the customer's requirements”. Quality Management is the process by which the quality of each deliverable is assured and controlled for the project, using Quality Assurance and Quality Control techniques.

The Quality Management Process entails using a variety of review techniques to assess the level of quality of deliverables and processes and implementing a set of actions to raise the level of quality within the project. The following steps are undertaken:

List the quality targets from the Quality Plan
Identify the types of quality measurement techniques required
Measure deliverable and process quality via Quality Assurance and Quality Control techniques
Take action to enhance the level of deliverable and process quality
Report on the level of quality attained to management.

Examples of preventative Quality Assurance techniques include researching historical quality issues on projects, ensuring adequate definition of requirements, recruiting appropriately skilled staff and undertaking Quality Assurance Reviews. Types of Quality Control techniques include Peer Reviews, Deliverable Reviews, documentation reviews, Stage-Gate Reviews and Process Reviews.

Quality Process, Quality Review Form & Deliverables Register.

Creating a detailed “Communications Plan”

During the Planning phase, it is necessary to identify how each of the stakeholders will be kept informed of the progress of the project. The Communications Plan identifies the types of information to be distributed, the methods of distributing information to stakeholders, the frequency of distribution and responsibilities of each person in the project team for distributing information regularly to stakeholders.

A clear Communications Plan is vital to the success of the project to ensure that all project resources are working towards the stated project objectives and that any hurdles are overcome in a well planned and informed manner. The Communications Plan should contain:

The communication requirements for each project stakeholder (i.e. who needs what information and when)
A schedule of the communication events, methods and releases (such as project team meetings, quality review meetings, customer acceptance meetings, status report releases and stage gate releases)
A matrix of the resource involved in each communication event (listing also their responsibilities)

A clear process for undertaking each communication event within the project.
Communications Plan template.