Chapter 13

Achieving Quality in Your Programme

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!

Understanding the Scope and Diversity of Quality Management

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.

As a useable definition, I suggest that quality is:

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:

• Quality management ensures that management aspects are working appropriately and the programme stays on target.
• The focus of quality is a set of goals that may change during the life of the programme, so the manner in which you manage quality may change during the programme.

If these ideas seem a bit abstract, don't worry: I expand on and clarify them in this section.

Answering two core quality questions

To help understand this issue, please consider two simple questions about the nature of quality:

• What is quality? Jot down on a piece of paper what you think the term ‘quality’ means.
• What do you measure the quality of? This question is more difficult to pose than to answer. Note down on your piece of paper the things whose quality you measure.

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.

If a stakeholder group has a particular definition of quality, they're right. In this case, perception is reality. Your task at programme level is to build a consensus between stakeholders’ views on the different, acceptable definitions of quality.

I'd like to clear up one confusing usage: ‘excellence’ isn't a definition of quality, even though quite often the marketing staff talk about ‘a quality product’, meaning that it's excellent or expensive. In the world of programme management, try and stay clear of this definition because excellence can be very expensive.

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:

• Fitness for purpose. If something is quality, it does what it needs to do.
• Meeting stated requirements. Assumes that you can document the requirements for a product.
• Meeting implied needs. This broader term leads to the question of how you understand and document those implied needs.
• Conformance and compliance. I don't intend to differentiate the meaning of those two words in detail, but quality is sometimes defined by carrying out a piece of work in a particular way, conformance if you like, or the work may be certified against a standard, which is compliance.

Measuring quality … but of what?

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.

Comparing quality management in projects and programmes

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:

• Project. You don't have to come to quality management in a programme environment from the project perspective. Nevertheless your programme has lots of projects, and people working in projects are familiar with the project view of quality management.

  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.

• Programme. In a programme you have a much broader focus than in a project. You focus on management, that is, the quality of management. You focus on processes and on alignment with the environment. Have you as a programme remained aligned with the external environment?

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.

Providing assurance

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 definition of programme assurance is:

• A systematic set of actions necessary to provide confidence to the Senior Responsible Owner and stakeholders that the programme:
  • Remains under control
  • On track to deliver
  • Aligned with strategic objectives

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.

Running through quality management principles

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.

You may like to ask yourself how you'd reinforce each programme principle using quality management before you read on.

Aligning with strategy

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:

• Are the right projects running?
• Are the governance strategies still current and still relevant?

Leading change

Leading change is where you get into assessing the quality of behaviours in the programme:

• Is the leadership being shown by leaders fit for purpose?
• Is it appropriate?
• Are senior people, your key players, exhibiting the behaviours that are needed in order to trigger the transformational change?
• Are you having an appropriate effect on the stakeholder landscape?
• Is your interaction with stakeholders such that they're supporting the programme or at least not actively interfering with it?

Envisaging a better future

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 of leadership
• Behaviours being exhibited
• Effect of the stakeholder landscape

Focusing on the benefits and the threats to them

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:

• Is all the benefits information current?
• Are the projects properly aligned with the benefits to be realized?
• Does the Risk Register illustrate the sensitivity of the benefits to various variables?
• Are business performance indicators being tracked?

Adding value

The quality management question around added value comes down to the following: is the programme still justified in its current form?

Delivering coherent capability

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:

• Validity of the Blueprint
• Ability of projects to deliver capability
• Ability of the business to adapt
• Effectiveness of management of project-level quality (remember that projects deliver the outputs that become that capability)

Learning from experience

Connecting to learning from experience, you can ask questions such as:

• How are reviews being carried out?
• Are they effective?
• How well are lessons being used?
• What effect is learning from experience having on the performance of the programme?

Investigating Interdependencies with Other Disciplines

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.

Before I describe the eight areas shown in the figure, please note how I use the following terms:

• Process: A set of related activities carried out in a defined order.
• System: Contains several processes and has management and control mechanisms.

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.

• Communications management. Quality activities need to test the perceptions of success of the stakeholders and the soundness of the relationships the programme has with them.
• Supply chain management. Suppliers have to apply quality management to their processes to ensure that they deliver their obligations and are effectively aligned with the programme.
• Standards management. Changes delivered by the programme need to continue to be aligned with corporate standards and policies, and you need some way of having a dialogue with the people who set those policies.
• Process management. You need to create programme processes with the right level of specification and rigour.
• Information management. The right information is provided in the right format, to the right people, at the right time. I write more on information management in the following section.
• Asset management. Assets that can range from programme information to software or the contents of buildings are protected when subject to planned or unplanned changes. This requirement almost certainly means that they need to be under configuration control, which I cover in Chapter 12.
• Programme leadership. Quality activities must ensure that good, effective leadership is taking place throughout the programme. I look at leadership in Chapters 9 and 14.
• People management. You need to apply principles such as leading change, envisioning and communicating a better future, and learning from experience, to get the best out of the people deployed onto the programme. They may be working in the programme for a considerable time.

Managing the Flow of Information

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.

The neatest way I know of establishing the credibility of a programme, without challenging the power of business as usual, is to take control of the information about the changes that are taking place and make that information available to those who are interested in it.

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.

Looking at information baselines: Types of programme information

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.

When you look at the process chapters (Chapters 3, 7 and 18 to 21) and in particular the process diagrams that I include in each chapter, you often see references to information baselines. These are the current versions of the sets of documents that go under each of these three headings:

• Boundary: Sets out the direction and scope of the programme.
• Governance: Sets standards and frameworks for delivery and how the programme is to be managed.
• Management: Used to manage delivery and what activities are to be undertaken by whom.

Addressing critical success factors in your Information Management Strategy

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.

Before you look at these headings, you may want to jot down what you see as being the critical success factors. What's critical if you're going to manage information successfully?

• Availability. Make information available. Give decision makers access to the information and documentation they need without making them put in too much effort.
• Confidentiality. Set the levels of confidentiality within the programme so that documents are allocated appropriate levels of sensitivity and limit their distribution accordingly. In other words, don't let people get at documents they don't need to see. You may need to set up audit trails and certification of confidentiality.
• Compliance. Make sure that information storage and retention is compliant with organizational policies and applicable legislation. In particular, consider data protection and freedom-of-information legislation and requirements, such as retention periods for personnel and financial records.
• Currency. Information being used should reflect the current situation. Acknowledge any gaps in reporting from projects or concerns about the accuracy of business performance data. Note the limitations that these problems can bring to decision-making.

  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.

• Integrity. Bring important information under change control and release management control; in other words, treat it all as configuration items (which I discuss in Chapter 12). You can ensure that the right versions of information are in circulation and use. Consider commissioning audits that check that the distribution systems are working.

  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!

Understanding the information documents

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.

Information Management Strategy

Here are the details of an Information Management Strategy:

• Purpose: To measure systems and techniques to control information
• Composition:
  • Audit scope
  • Confidentiality
  • Configuration management
  • Effectiveness criteria
  • Information security and standards
  • Integrity
  • Release management and availability
  • Responsibilities
  • Storage systems

Information Management Plan

Below the Information Management Strategy you need an Information Management Plan:

• Purpose: To produce a timetable and arrangements for implementing the Information Management Strategy
• Composition:
  • Information assets
  • Monitoring and reporting
  • Responsibilities
  • Schedule for templates
  • Schedule for providing information to support reviews
  • Timetables

Describing Quality Documentation and Areas of Responsibility

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.

Explaining the Programme Quality Processes: Quality and Assurance Strategy

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:

• Purpose: To define and establish activities for managing quality
• Composition:
  • Aspects subject to review and control
  • Assurance results processing
  • Audit and health-check guidelines
  • Continual improvement mechanisms
  • Corporate systems and interfaces
  • Functions and roles
  • Integrated assurance arrangements
  • Internal audit interfaces
  • Links to independent assurance
  • Monitoring and control interfaces
  • Performance and tracking processes
  • Post quality check action
  • Programme success criteria
  • Responsibilities
  • Standards and experts
  • Triggers

Detailing what to do: The Quality and Assurance Plan

The Quality and Assurance Strategy from the preceding section is supported by a Quality and Assurance Plan:

• Purpose: To produce a timetable and arrangements for carrying out the Quality and Assurance Strategy
• Composition:
  • Assurance arrangements
  • Effort and costs
  • Responsibilities
  • Schedule
  • Schedule of assurance reviews
  • Timing and conduct of audits, reviews and health checks
  • Timing and conduct of quality monitoring and analysis

Allocating responsibility for quality

Here are the main areas of responsibility relating to quality and assurance management. Check out Chapter 9 for more about these roles.

Senior Responsible Owner

The Senior Responsible Owner is that very senior individual accountable for the success of the programme. This person is responsible for the following areas:

• Consulting with the Sponsoring Group on the approach to programme assurance.
• Ensuring that an adequate assurance regime is in place for all aspects of quality in the programme.
• Signing off the quality and information management strategies.
• Initiating assurance reviews and audits.
• Maintaining focus on the programme management principles.

Programme Manager

The Programme Manager runs the programme day-to-day, and is responsible for:

• Developing and implementing the Quality and Assurance Strategy and Plans (of the preceding section) and co-ordinating delivery of outputs from the projects that are fit for purpose and are capable of achieving the desired outcomes and benefits.
• Developing and implementing the Information Management Strategy and Plan (see the earlier section ‘Managing the Flow of Information’).
• Initiating assurance reviews of project and supplier performance.
• Ensuring that lessons learned are implemented.

Business Change Managers

Business Change Managers bed down the changes in their part of the business. They're responsible for:

• Implementing transition and realizing and reviewing benefits derived from the outputs of the projects.
• Initiating assurance reviews of business performance and change readiness.
• Ensuring that business change lessons are learned and implemented.

Programme Office

The Programme Office looks after the administration of the programme and is responsible for:

• Establishing and maintaining the programme's Quality and Assurance Plan and ensuring the establishment of the appropriate audit, assurance and review processes for the programme in accordance with the Quality and Assurance Strategy.
• Establishing and maintaining the programme's Information Management Plan and ensuring the establishment of the appropriate audit, assurance and review processes for the programme in accordance with the Information Management Strategy.
• Providing information to support assurance reviews.