Quality Control
Quality control is a project management process. In this process, the project team verifies the project products and processes, to confirm if they comply with the quality standards adopted. I the team finds that something was not done correctly according to the quality standards, the team does all to work necessary to correct the situation. The reality is that as sooner the team finds all the problems the better. It’s cheaper to correct problems that are in the beginning.
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Why Do We Need Quality Control?
Quality control’s main role is to inspect the quality of products and processes. This is very important because of at least two factors. The first one is that it’s cheaper to correct a defect or an error earlier in the project. Secondly, it’s cheaper to correct an error that the team found them an error that the client found. Moreover, if the error gets to the client, this may cause a confidence problem and a financial problem. Furthermore, the client may lose confidence in our work and in the worst-case scenario, may cancel the project.
How can we define Quality Control?
Quality control as we already mentioned is a project management process. Therefore, in this process team members try to verify the quality of the product, process, or project, looking for any errors or defects that may jeopardize the work already done. Another, of its main characteristics, is that it involves testing elements to see if they are inside the specification limits.
Even if all projects should do quality control, the process can be different depending on the organization, industry, activity, or even the project. Therefore, the team has many quality control approaches to choose from.
To be sure that quality control is implemented and does its job, the organization should promote an environment where team members and management pursue improvement. This improvement is, however, achievable with coaching and training. Moreover, the organization should create an environment where benchmarking and continuous improvement practices are promoted and awarded
How those the team do Quality Control?
The first thing, and probably the most important is to define quality control procedures. The team defines the quality control procedures that are in the quality management plan. This is one of the plans inside the project management plan. These procedures will be fundamental for the team to systematize and do her work more quickly.
Normally, at the conclusion of a product, the team performs quality testing. This makes the work of the team easier since will be more simple to identify problems and correct them. Even so, the team should perform testing activities throughout product development to reduce the costs of the need to fix defects and errors. Testing activities are the way to carry out quality inspections. However, the team can use other processes to see if the product meets the requirements.
Quality Control vs. Quality Assurance
Even if many people use the terms quality control and quality assurance indifferently, in reality, they have different meanings. Quality assurance’s main purpose is to give confidence to stakeholders. In other words, everything is compliant, like the product, the project, or the process. On the other hand, quality controls look to verify if each specific element complies.