Chapter 13
In This ChapterIn This Chapter
Considering the scope and diversity of quality management
Linking quality management to other parts of the programme
Managing information in your programme
Applying quality management to specific parts of your programme
Documenting your approach to quality management
Quality management within a programme can be a large and complex subject. If you're building, for example, a piece of safety-critical infrastructure that a wide range of stakeholder groups are going to use, quality management runs through everything you do within the programme. But this complexity doesn't mean that quality management has to be a difficult subject to understand.
This chapter provides a sound start on the journey towards mastering quality in your programme. I take a look at the scope and nature of quality and its management. I come over all practical and examine what you need to do in the real world as part of quality management, in order to align the programme with MSP principles. Quality management affects many other aspects of programme management, so I discuss the relationship between quality management and topics such as your suppliers and any standards with which you have to comply.
In order to achieve quality, you need to control properly the information in the programme, which is why I cover information management, from the critical success factors through to definitions of the types of information you need. I also discuss the purpose and composition of the documents in which you describe how you plan to manage information and quality in your programme.
All in all, this is a quality-filled chapter!
Quality means different things to different people, and you have to accommodate all these definitions when managing quality within your programme.
You may want to read this definition now, but if you want to ease yourself in gently, skip down the page to my two core questions. You can always come back to this definition later.
The totality of features and inherent or assigned characteristics of a product, person, process, service or system that bears on its ability to show that it meets expectations or stated needs, requirements or specification.
This description allows me to state the following about quality management:
If these ideas seem a bit abstract, don't worry: I expand on and clarify them in this section.
Take a little time to consider those questions and bear them in mind as I share with you my views on the nature of quality.
I've heard many definitions of quality over the years, and in a diverse programme you can find stakeholder groups with differing views on what quality is.
In the following list I present some terms that define quality. You may be familiar with them, and you're certainly able to manage them:
The first thing that springs to mind when considering what you measure is products (or outputs) from projects. If you move along the programme chain from products, you can measure the quality of capabilities and the quality of outcomes.
When you talk about benefits reviews, which I cover in Chapter 16, perhaps you're measuring the quality of benefits. Going a bit further, you can look at the fitness for purpose (the quality) of the processes within the programme.
You can also consider the quality, the fitness for purpose, of programme personnel, which can be contentious territory. You can end up recommending that a person isn't suitable for a role in a programme, and if you're talking about senior roles, your life can become very interesting.
Finally you can measure the quality of the activities you carry out within the programme. Indeed, you can measure the quality of anything that may be classed as a programme asset.
‘So what?’ I hear you say. I’d like you to have reached two conclusions. First, programme quality is not about measuring just one thing in only one way. Second, programme quality is about assessing lots of different aspects of the programme in a range of ways, that your stakeholders will be comfortable with. That means the programme needs to put together a patchwork quilt of quality and assurance checks that covers you completely but doesn’t smother you. If you get the patchwork quilt, you get programme quality.
Quality management involves much more than project quality management. If you come from a project background, you may find reflecting on the differences between quality in the project and programme worlds reassuring:
In a project, quality management is about outputs that meet acceptance criteria or meet the specification. In other words, outputs that are fit for purpose.
You're bound to face changes to the environment over the length of the programme, so you need to be prepared to change your approach to quality management. You also need to be aware of and indeed understand the corporate priorities, for they're going to change as well. Overall you're demonstrating that the Blueprint and plans are remaining aligned with corporate priorities.
This governance theme in MSP is called quality and assurance management, so I'd like to be clear on the meaning of assurance as the term is often misused. I frequently hear of people talking about carrying out quality assurance (QA) when in fact they're carrying out quality checking or quality control (QC).
The key idea is to provide confidence, reassurance if you like, that you're on track.
Instead of discussing assurance management in this chapter, I do so in Chapter 14 because I think that you get an interesting perspective by looking at it while considering stakeholders.
Any discussion about quality management can easily become overly abstract. To avoid this problem and make quality management in a programme more real, I look at each of the principles. Looking at quality management in comparison to each of the programme principles is a powerful tool. Chapter 4 describes these principles and may well help you clarify your ideas about quality management.
This section contains a powerful set of ideas relating quality to principles and some useful questions to ask yourself. I hope that it gets you thinking practically about quality management.
In order for quality management to assist with achieving this principle, you check on the validity of documents such as the Vision, the Blueprint, the Business Case and the Benefits Realization Plan.
Ask yourself the following questions to be true to (remain aligned with) the strategy principle:
Leading change is where you get into assessing the quality of behaviours in the programme:
Linking to this principle is about more than checking whether a Vision has been published. It involves assessing whether the levels of engagement within the programme are appropriate and whether people have a true understanding of what you intend to deliver and the benefits to come.
Think about subjects such as the following:
Quality management can do simple things, such as ensuring that ‘benefits’ is an item on the programme board agenda. Other aspects of benefits quality are covered if you ask questions such as:
The quality management question around added value comes down to the following: is the programme still justified in its current form?
One principle is to design and deliver a coherent capability. You can check the fitness for purpose of the capability and its coherence by asking questions around the following:
Connecting to learning from experience, you can ask questions such as:
The preceding section reveals the nature, scope and sheer diversity of quality management within a programme. But the scope of quality activities is broader than just the principles, because the latter are overarching. Another set to linkages (dependencies) are identified in MSP, which give you a further insight into how all-pervasive quality management can and should be.
You may be wondering why I don't include many figures in this chapter. I'm a great fan of diagrams when the included relationships add value, but that's not the nature of quality management, I'm afraid: it's more abstract. Figure 13-1, however, is one diagram that successfully illustrates the relationships between quality management and other aspects of programme management.
Figure 13-1 illustrates the process areas that require management review of their effectiveness in supporting programme objectives. Process areas are just aspects of programme management. Management review in this way is another way of saying quality.
The quality management you set up in your programme needs to look at the effectiveness of all the processes and systems that exist within the programme. In business as usual, the effectiveness of process and systems is (I hope) in place. You need to put in an equal and appropriate level of rigour in the processes and systems that you're setting up.
Here are the elements in Figure 13-1, moving clockwise around the figure. I don't get specific about who does each of these actions – whatever works for your organization is fine.
Information management may sound like a dry and boring subject, but I've seen programmes lose control of change simply because they didn't manage the information about the programme sufficiently carefully.
A programme commonly has to prove itself to business as usual. After all, it's the new kid on the block (ahh, where are they now!). Business as usual, and perhaps even projects, are reluctant to cede power and authority to the programme, which makes it difficult for the programme to demonstrate that it's adding value.
If you're the source that people contact to find out what's going on, you rapidly gain power and authority. Often when I go into a programme the first thing I look at is information management.
To be honest, in one sense I talk about information management throughout this whole book: every time I mention a document, it's a location where you manage information. In Chapter 7, I give you an overview of all the documents you may need in a programme, grouping the documents into several classes. Here are the official MSP definitions of those different classes of documents.
To achieve quality of documentation, you almost certainly have to state your Information Management Strategy. I identify some critical success factors that go with this Strategy.
At a more basic level, you need to avoid information being held in discrete documents and then being copied from one place to another, being duplicated and left to sit in an apparently current document which is in fact out of date. You need to think about how you manage the Information Hub in order to maintain a database of current information.
I recall asking to see the Vision of one programme I was looking at. The people showed me one, and another, and another, and another, and another! They had five different visions in circulation, all substantially different – not great information management!
In your programme you're probably going to set up a new way of managing information. You're going to have to write down and tell people how you're going to do that. That means you have to create some documents that explain what you're going to do. In this section I cover a few strategies and plans related to information management.
Here are the details of an Information Management Strategy:
Below the Information Management Strategy you need an Information Management Plan:
In this section I grab a large lasso and round up the quality and assurance management documents that I haven't already covered in this or other chapters and give details of who needs to do what. You may notice that I'm using the term quality and assurance management. Assurance management is an extremely important complement to quality management. I discuss it in more detail in Chapter 14 and describe only the documents here.
At the top of the pile sits a Quality and Assurance Strategy. This is the first document to read if you want to know how quality is going to work:
The Quality and Assurance Strategy from the preceding section is supported by a Quality and Assurance Plan:
Here are the main areas of responsibility relating to quality and assurance management. Check out Chapter 9 for more about these roles.
The Senior Responsible Owner is that very senior individual accountable for the success of the programme. This person is responsible for the following areas:
The Programme Manager runs the programme day-to-day, and is responsible for:
Business Change Managers bed down the changes in their part of the business. They're responsible for:
The Programme Office looks after the administration of the programme and is responsible for:
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