The Quality component forms part of the PRINCE2 Foundation and PRINCE2 Practitioner courses offered by Knowledge Train.
PRINCE2 defines quality as the extent to which a product is ‘fit for purpose’ of satisfying stated needs. In other words, does a product meet its stated requirements? This component describes the way in which projects can achieve the levels of quality expected from the project.
The starting point when talking about quality in PRINCE2 is to define the customer’s expectations of quality. For example, a car company who has decided to design and build a new racing car might identify that the car must be fast enough to allow it to win races during the next two years. Quite often customer’s quality expectations are vague and high level, but are a useful starting point when thinking about quality.
Once these have been stated, they can be turned into acceptance criteria which are the measurable characteristics required of the final products which makes them acceptable to the customer. For example, the car must be capable of a top speed of 300kph and acceleration of 0-300kph within 4 seconds. These characteristics can be measured by performing tests.
The management product where the Project Manager must plan how to achieve quality is the Project Quality Plan. This plan describes how the customer’s quality expectations shall be met on the project. Some of the things that must be considered here are which quality standards, policies and procedures within both the customer and supplier organisations shall be applied on the project and what kinds of quality controls (or quality reviews) shall be appropriate to check the quality of the different products. This plan is written during the Initiation Stage of the project and forms part of the Project Initiation Document which is approved by the Project Board at the end of the Initiation Stage.
At the end of each stage the Project Manager must plan in detail the next stage of work (Stage Plan). This planning work must involve deciding and specifying which products are to be built during the next stage. Product Descriptions are written to specify the purpose and quality criteria of the product. These quality criteria can be thought of as the detailed specifications of the product i.e. how the product is to look, feel, behave.
This next Stage Plan must include the details of the quality checks that shall be performed during the stage, who shall perform them and when. Further details of these checks must be added to the Team Plan which covers the work involved in building each product. After planning a stage the Quality Log is updated by the Project Manager with the planned dates of the checks, persons responsible, method of checking and target sign-off date.
When the project team is assigned the work to build the products during the stage, the quality checks from the Stage and Team Plans are performed and the results of these checks updated in the Quality Log. If the check has been completed and the product can be shown to be ‘fit for purpose’ then sign-off for the product can be obtained and this date must be entered into the Quality Log. The Quality Log therefore serves as a summary of all quality checks on a project and by so doing, can indicate to the Project Manager an objective measurement of progress i.e. that a product has gone through its quality checks, has been signed off and is ‘fit for purpose’.
When the quality checks are being performed, what do the persons performing the checks need to check? The answer is the ‘quality criteria’ from the product description for that product. By performing some objective test or subjective assessment, these persons can conclude whether or not the product conforms to its ‘quality criteria’ and is therefore ‘fit for purpose’.
If a product fails this test, then minor errors would be expected to be fixed quickly. Major errors requiring more time to fix must be raised as a Project Issue – see chapter on Change Control.
This article was taken from the booklet Concise PRINCE2™ (PRINCE2 ™ is a Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce) which was offered to students as part of the PRINCE2 training course (version 2005) by Knowledge Train. This booklet has been based on OGC (PRINCE2™) material. Reproduced under licence from OGC.
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