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When it comes to project management, there are several aspects of the process that you need to keep in mind to ensure that it is a successful venture. You need to make sure that you have all the resources you need, you need to plan out and stick to the timeline, and you also need to make sure that your project does not exceed the budgetary constraints you have set for yourself. But another issue that takes the utmost priority for any project is quality assurance.
Regardless of how fast or cost effective your venture ends up being, it would be considered a failure if it is not up to the expected quality standards. Conforming to the quality guidelines in accordance with the requirements, demands, and expectations of your customer is an extremely critical aspect of project management of any kind or sort. That is why it is important for you to familiarize yourself with quality assurance in project management.
What Is Quality Assurance?
To begin with, we need to determine how we define quality, particularly in the sphere of information technology. Quality, in this case, would be defined as how well you have conformed to customer requirements and expectations. At the end of the day, the goal of the IT project is to produce a deliverable that satisfies the demands of the relevant stakeholders, and unless you do that, your product is not up to the required standard.
Quality assurance, also known as QA, means that you are sticking to the requirements that are set to you by the client. The goal is to maximize the efficiency and productivity of the project cycle while ensuring that the end product meets the minimum criteria to be accepted as a functional deliverable.
When it comes to quality assurance in project management, you have to understand that it is an all encompassing factor. This does not mean that you can just tick off items from a checklist at the end of the project when the product has been developed and finalized. Quality assurance must take place at every step of the planning and development process to make it truly efficient. Otherwise you will be expending tonnes of time and resources into a project that is doomed to fail. To decrease the chances of developing below par IT products, you need to incorporate quality checking checkpoints at the end of and throughout the different stages of your development process, from the point you identify the problem, down to the point that you are ready to deploy the product.
Testing And Assessment
Continuous assessment and improvement is one way to incorporate quality assurance into a project cycle. The advantage of operating in the contemporary era is that you have a plethora of tools that can be used to implement quality checks at every step of the way, ensuring that you have a high quality output at the end of the project cycle. The goal is to identify problems and opportunities to improve as we go along the lifetime of the project, and then building the appropriate simulations to test these potential changes and implement them if possible. Constant monitoring during the project management cycle also ensures that any bugs or problems with the product are caught early on and can be fixed on the spot without having to dismantle or impact the rest of the features.
Planning For Quality Assurance
To implement the most effective quality assurance guidelines, it is important to plan ahead and take a proactive approach as opposed to waiting for a problem to arise. You need to clearly determine the requirements for the project, analyze the lifecycle of the product through the developmental process, and then brainstorm on how the standard of the deliverable can be managed with the help of modern tools and testing techniques. You will also need to determine certain criteria or metrics which can be used to judge the quality of the deliverable through the project management process.