QUALITY MANAGEMENT
QUALITY MANAGEMENT PLAN
PROJECT QUALITY MANAGEMENT PLAN
QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

COMMON ACRONYMS
QMP, QMS

COMMON STANDARDS OF PRACTICE

1. ISO 9000 - Quality Management Systems Requirements
2. ISO 9004:2008 — Guidelines for performance improvement.
3. Kaizen - Continuous improvement.
4. Six Sigma
5. Taguchi Methods
6. Quality Circle
7. QFD - Quality Function Deployment
8. The Toyota Production System
9. OQRM - Object oriented Quality and Risk Management
10. TQM - Total Quality Management

DEFINITION
Quality Management is the act of overseeing all activities and tasks needed to maintain a desired level of excellence. It ensures superior quality products and services with consistency and improvement. It includes various aspects such as;

1. Determination of a Quality policy
2. Establishment of Quality Objectives
3. Creation of a Quality Management System: The QMS (Quality Management System) is a document prepared by all organisations, Client or the Contractor for themselves. It provides a structure for documentation and processes not only on a particular construction project, but also across the entire organization, and enables product and service delivery to be controlled and managed to meet the specified quality requirements consistently. The Quality Management System (QMS) shall comply with ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Systems standards requirements and is suitable for achieving certification to ISO 9001:2015 Quality management systems standards. It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information and resources needed to implement and maintain it. A QMS for submission for a project may have two parts, a corporate Quality management system and QMP for the project. Following are the important core elements of a QMS.
   1. Quality Policy: ISO 9001:2008 requires top management to “establish” the quality policy (5.1), and to “ensure” that it is reviewed for continuing suitability. It is normally a single page (framed and hung at prominent locations) document that shows the directive from the top management, to show an organisation's commitment to quality and to establish emphasis on quality within an organisation.
   2. Quality Objectives: Quality objectives are measurable quality control methods established by companies according to ISO 9001:2015 standards. Quality objectives must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time Specific). Some examples of the most common quality objectives include:
      1. Defects: Send out fewer than X percent of products with a defect.
      2. Conformance: Ensure implementation of Quality standards/ requirements and reduce non-conformance observations
      3. Performance: Increase product performance to X hours of use.
      4. Efficiency: Improve operational efficiency by X percent.
      5. Timeliness: Bus service with less than 1% late arrivals
      6. Reliability: Target of zero bugs in an application release
      7. Safety: Have zero safety incidents in the workplace or zero product recalls.
      8. Delivery: Achieve X percent of on-time deliveries.
      9. Availability: Set a target for uptime of a service to X percent
      10. Customer service: Maintain a customer satisfaction rate of X percent.
      11. Accuracy: Reduce out of stock items by improving investory forecasting accuracy
   3. Quality Manual: The purpose of any quality manual is to describe the boundaries of the quality management system, via the management system’s scope, the applicability of ISO clauses, internal process definition and the quality policy. A quality manual is not a requirement of ISO 9001 and is therefore, not a mandatory document.
   4. Leadership: Organizational Structure and Responsibilities
   5. Data Management
   6. Processes/ Process approach
   7. Customer Focus: Satisfaction with Product Quality
   8. Engagement of people/ stakeholders
   9. Relationship management
   10. Continuous Improvement
   11. Evidence-based decision making
   12. Quality Instruments
   13. Document Control
4. Selection of a Quality Method/ Approach
5. Creation of a Quality Plan: The QMP, Quality Management Plan is a project or contract specific plan, prepared by the contractor for a project. The intended audience of a QMP is the senior leaders of the project team, including Client and the Contractor, whose support is needed to carry out the plan. This Quality Plan is to be continually reviewed, and any changes to the plan will be handled by the project's procedure for Change Management. The plan is approved by the Client's Project Manager. For instance, a quality plan in a manufacturing company may include procedures that describe the processes of productions and responsibilities associated, product specifications, and applicable measurement standards.The QMP describes the necessary information required to effectively manage the following;
   1. Project quality, from project planning to delivery,
   2. Quality objectives in the project
   3. Roles and responsibilities, and
   4. Quality Management approach to ensure that the quality objectives are achieved
6. Implementation of Quality Plan
7. Quality Assurance (QA): Quality Assurance is a system, focuses on the process of quality, and includes Quality Control. Includes planning and documenting the processes to assure quality including things such as quality plans and inspection and test plans. Quality Assurance is a proactive process and is Prevention in nature. It recognizes flaws in the process. Quality Assurance has to complete before Quality Control. QA involves developing the program while QC always involves executing the program. All team members are responsible for QA but only Testing team is responsible for QC.
8. Quality Control (QC): Quality Control is a process within the system, focuses on the quality of product/ output. Quality Control is a reactive process and is detection in nature. It is the physical verification that the product conforms to these planned arrangements by inspection and measurements. Two most common methods of inspection are:
   1. Inspection
   1. Product Inspection
   1. Total Inspection
   2. Sample Inspection/ Partial Inspection
   2. Process Inspection
   3. Inspection Analysis
   2. Statistical Quality Control
9. Quality Improvement (QI): It is a systematic and formal approach to the analysis of performance and efforts to improve performance.

WHY
The QMP guides the Project Manager (PM) and project personnel to execute quality management and quality assurance activities for a project or program, so that the end users get what they paid for and are satisfied with the final product.

Organizations use QMS frameworks to guide continuous improvement efforts, improve Process efficiency, and adopt data for evidence-based decision making. QMS helps in achieving certification with globally recognized standards such as ISO 9001 to improve quality through transparency, documentation, and systemic approaches to improvement.

WHEN
A quality management plan is developed at the very early stage of the project and it evolves with the life cycle of the project. It is mandatory to have an approved QMP early in place, and specially before starting the design stage, the execution stage and the operations stage.

HOW
In general, a QMP shall have the following minimum contents.

1. Title
2. Revision History
3. Purpose of the Document
4. Proposed Development/ Project Scope of Work and Schedule
5. Quality Management Approach
6. Jurisdiction, Reviews and Approvals (Roles and responsibilities)
7. Design Basis and Applicable Standards
8. Quality Control
9. Quality Assurance
10. Tools
11. Reporting
12. Glossary, Conventions and Definitions
13. Appendices/ Exhibits

EXAMPLES
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