Project Management: Quality Control

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Quality Control in Project Management

“The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right — but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.” –Peter Drucker

A key process in the delivery of a quality project is that of quality control. Quality control is the process of ensuring that the project deliverables meet the defined project standards by measuring, evaluating and correcting project outputs.

The quality control process includes measuring, evaluating, correcting and report of project errors. The project errors can include defects in materials, poor construction or unsatisfactory service. The goal of quality control in project management is to keep the variance in of the deliverables within the accepted limits (Tayntor, 2010).

Quality control is related to, but different from quality assurance. Were quality assurance is focused on preventing project shortcomings and defects, quality control is concerned with detecting and correcting defects in the project outputs. Quality Assurance and quality control are often conducted by the same personnel in project, depending on the size of the project team.

Even with the most rigorous of quality assurance processing in place, the highest quality materials, the best trained project staff; errors and defects will occur in a project. Without a proper quality control program in place it will not be possible to find and correct. Even if a project is delivered on time and within budget, it may be considered unacceptable if it fails to meet quality standards. Quality control will keep the mistakes out of the hands of the customers (Phillips, 2008).

Quality control in project management consists of four elements, measurements, evaluations, co...

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...vidual work items, such a subsection of a building or it can be the analysis of an entire process.

Potential downfalls in quality control are incomplete testing and utilizing the wrong measurement. If the project processes and deliverable that are subject to quality control are not all inclusive defects will escape detection and correction. It is through the application of a rigorous quality control program that is avoided.

Using the wrong measurements to assess project quality had a doubled impact on quality control. By using the wrong measurements, defects will be left undetected and make to the clients. Additional, the time spend taking the wrong measurements will have an impact on the project times.

In order to deal with these quality challenges a project team should have a formalized quality control procedure and dedicated quality control team members.

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