Quality in Program and Project Management

Throughout the lifecycle of a project, from the very beginning to its introduction to the market, the most vital and perhaps the most challenging task for a manager is to maintain and evaluate the quality of handling things. As for a program manager, whose task is to supervise the whole cluster of projects, the quality of the management impacts the success of the project (and the company) in general.

Let’s take a closer look into the topic of the quality of Program and Project Management, explore its difference from product quality, and the ways to measure it without sacrificing other resources necessary for successful product implementation.

The Relationship Between Project Management Quality and Success Rates

In terms of the product, quality is a characteristic that determines a product’s proximity to the specification — the desired characteristics, features, and requirements for creating a product.

What is the quality of project or program management? The quality of project/program management is a value inversely proportional to the deviation of the actual state of the project’s target characteristics (scope, deadlines, spent resources) from the desired state of these characteristics.

The success of the project, in turn, is determined by the magnitude of the deviation from the original characteristics of the project. If the result of the project falls within the value of the permissible deviation from the initially established characteristics of the project, then the project is successful. Thus, the quality of project management determines the success of the project.

How to Incorporate Quality Control Measures in Project Management

It is necessary to ensure and measure the quality of project/program management throughout the entire lifecycle of the project. Sometimes quality can play a decisive role in the existence of the project altogether: with a low quality of project management during the lifecycle, there is a higher risk that further project execution is no longer possible.

To incorporate project/program management quality oversight, it is essential to formalize the characteristic of the deviation from the initial characteristics of the project. Having a designated way to measure the value of this characteristic, it is possible to compare the value with the maximum permissible parameters and develop the necessary action to bring the value of the characteristic closer to the target value. Here is a diagram depicting the described method:

As can be seen from the diagram, the greater the deviation of the actual state from the target, the lower the quality of project management. To improve the quality of management, the deviation has to be taken into account and provoke a mandatory reaction to itself, leading to a corrective action relevant to the deviation vector.

From this, we can deduce that creating a process that always allows for a predictable deviation from the initial characteristics of the project gives, in essence, the ability to obtain high-quality project management at the system level.

Quality vs. Speed: Striking a Balance in Program and Project Management

There is a common opinion claiming that quality is one of the sides of the quality-time-cost triangle, and that it cannot be achieved simultaneously with the other two characteristics. I am ready to challenge this, at least in terms of the quality of project/program management.

Investing resources in improving quality leads to significant cost savings across the project altogether, since the resources needed to mitigate the deviation far exceed the resources needed to ensure the quality of management. Furthermore, minimizing the deviation from the target state also leads to a reduction in time spent on the implementation. As a result, improving the quality of project management can lead (and usually does) to both a reduction in time and a decrease in the cost of the project. That brings us to the conclusion expressed earlier in the article: poor quality oversight can lead to the complete failure of the whole process. In fact, when the quality of project/program management is low, the scale of the consequences is boundless.

Deriving from everything discussed earlier, we have a conclusion discernible on the surface. Quality in both Program and Project Management is essential, and it is a great step on the way to successful results. It allows a deeper look into project dynamics, as well as prevents the excessive waste of resources or, in many cases, a total failure of the project in general.