Chapter 13

Quality

In This Chapter

Getting to grips with the management products related to quality

Checking that you understand Quality Review

Knowing the place of the Product Description within quality management

Having a go with a quick quiz and some practice exam questions

Like the other themes, the Quality theme has a whole section devoted to it in the Practitioner exam and is the subject of quite a lot of questions in the Foundation question pool from which the 75 in your Foundation exam will be drawn.

The chapter on Quality in the official PRINCE2 manual is a little strange, and always has been. As a result, you may feel unsure about the theme to the point that you think you don’t ‘get’ it. Also, if you have any professional experience in the area of quality, you may feel uncomfortable and think that everything seems rather off beam. If you experience either or both of these two reactions, don’t worry . . . it’s not you. PRINCE2 is actually pretty good when it comes to quality, it’s just that the chapter explaining it is rather focused on procedures and definitions, and that tends to obscure the quality approach.

Your approach to revision then should be to put aside any unease and instead ensure that you understand the individual components of quality management in PRINCE2. So, for example, what exactly is the Quality Management Strategy and just how does a Product Description figure when it comes to quality management in a project?

A particular area to watch out for is Quality Review (QR). A common misconception is that every product in a PRINCE2 project must go through QR. This formal type of review is actually only needed, usually, for a small number of products, and in a particular project may not be used at all. If you don’t see why, dip into the ‘Clarifying Some Key Points’ section later in this chapter.