How do you guarantee IT project deliverables are high quality?

1 Define quality criteria

Before you start working on your IT project, you need to define what quality means for your deliverables. Quality criteria are the standards and specifications that your deliverables must meet to be considered acceptable and satisfactory. You can use various sources to define your quality criteria, such as project requirements, user feedback, industry benchmarks, regulatory compliance, and best practices. You should document your quality criteria clearly and communicate them to your project team, stakeholders, and customers, so that everyone is on the same page about what constitutes high quality.

2 Implement quality assurance

Quality assurance is the process of ensuring that your IT project follows the established quality criteria and procedures throughout its lifecycle. Quality assurance involves monitoring, reviewing, and auditing your project activities, processes, and outputs, and identifying and resolving any quality issues or deviations. You can use various tools and methods to implement quality assurance, such as quality management systems, quality plans, quality checklists, quality audits, quality control charts, and quality reviews. Quality assurance helps you prevent quality problems from occurring and maintain a consistent level of quality across your project.

3 Conduct quality testing

Quality testing is the process of verifying that your IT project deliverables meet the defined quality criteria and function as intended. Quality testing involves checking your deliverables for any errors, defects, or bugs, and validating their performance, functionality, usability, reliability, security, and compatibility. You can use various types of quality testing, such as unit testing, integration testing, system testing, acceptance testing, regression testing, and performance testing. You can also use various tools and techniques to conduct quality testing, such as test cases, test scripts, test data, test automation, and test reports. Quality testing helps you detect and correct quality problems before they affect your customers or users.

4 Apply quality improvement

Quality improvement is the process of enhancing the quality of your IT project deliverables by learning from your quality testing results and feedback. Quality improvement involves analyzing your quality data and metrics, identifying your quality gaps and root causes, and implementing corrective and preventive actions to improve your quality performance. You can use various frameworks and methodologies to apply quality improvement, such as Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA), Six Sigma, Lean, Kaizen, and Agile. Quality improvement helps you continuously optimize your quality processes and outputs, and increase your customer and user satisfaction.

5 Involve quality stakeholders

Quality stakeholders are the people who have an interest or influence on the quality of your IT project deliverables, such as your project team, customers, users, sponsors, managers, and suppliers. Involving your quality stakeholders in your quality management process can help you ensure that your deliverables meet their needs and expectations, and that they are engaged and supportive of your project. You can involve your quality stakeholders in various ways, such as soliciting their input and feedback, sharing your quality information and reports, conducting quality reviews and inspections, and facilitating quality collaboration and communication.

6 Review quality lessons learned

Quality lessons learned are the insights and knowledge that you gain from your quality management process, and that you can use to improve your future IT projects. Reviewing your quality lessons learned can help you identify what worked well and what didn't work well in your quality management process, and what you can do differently or better next time. You can review your quality lessons learned at the end of your project or at regular intervals throughout your project, and document them in a quality lessons learned report or database. You should also share your quality lessons learned with your project team and other relevant parties, so that they can benefit from your quality experience and best practices.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?