Quality Management Plan: Understand and Implement

Quality management is a key factor in ensuring customer satisfaction and meeting customer expectations.

Having an effective, well-structured quality management plan guarantees that the standards defined for a given product or service actually meet their purpose.

But, after all, what is a quality management plan? What are the points that deserve our attention when we’re planning? How can we speed up the processes involving quality management?

Learn how planning can ensure delivery within the established timeframe, achieve the standards set for the project, and reduce time and rework costs.

What is a quality management plan?

A quality management plan is one of the steps of a project elaboration. It will define the quality goals, procedures, and resources necessary for its realization. The plan is divided into three main blocks:

Planning

It consists of identifying standards, and quality requirements, and documenting how the project demonstrates compliance with established criteria. This phase should be performed in parallel with the other processes that comprise the project planning.

Management

Quality management is the execution of everything that was raised during planning. In this stage will occur the audit and control activities that will ensure that the defined quality standards are being met.

In this phase, there may be requests for changes, updates in the management plan, in documentation, and information about the performance of the work developed.

Control

Control, or monitoring, will be the process responsible for maintaining the quality always at the desired level. It’s also in the control phase where improvements will arise aiming to enhance the already created processes, identifying points that have not obtained the expected results.

What points deserve attention when planning?

ISO 9001: 2015 presents 7 principles of quality management that should be taken into consideration when planning. These are topics that, if worked on in the right way, will bring assertive results in the delivery of a quality project. They are:

Focus on the customer

Quality for whom? To seek quality is to understand that satisfying the client must be the mission of every project that intends to succeed. It should be the mission of the entire company, actually. Focusing on the customer with quality in mind, as controversial as it may sound, is not about looking outside, but inside, creating standardized processes, constantly training employees, and practicing continuous improvement.

Leadership

A leader committed to delivery will bring the necessary organization and motivation to the team. Not only that, the leader must be the main communicator, who understands internal processes of the company and pass on clear and objective information to other team members. Here, it’s important to emphasize that the involvement should be of leaders at all levels, both in the process of deployment, delegation of tasks and maintenance in the quality management system.

Engaging people

Directly related to the previous point, a committed leadership will make those involved engaged, after all, a watch only works well if all its cogs are working together.

A committed team must understand, not only the process in which they are involved, but its importance in a global way. How this process will impact the next steps and what its relevance is for a delivery with excellence.

Process approach

The process approach is basically about understanding what the inputs and outputs are, and how they will be involved in the subsequent step. If the processes are well understood and mapped out, the path to future improvements will become clearer. Here the PDCA cannot fail to be mentioned, as it covers the whole part of getting involved with the plans, execution, checking the accomplishment of the tasks, and actions for correction or prevention.

Continuous Improvement

With today’s fast pace, anyone who stands still is already regressing. The search for improvement is not only about trying to improve what has been created, but also about not allowing the quality processes implemented at the beginning of the project to become obsolete. What works today may not be useful tomorrow.

Fact-based decision-making

Decisions cannot be made based on guesswork, so creating analysis and gathering evidence will lead to better decision-making and improvements. Performance indicators will bring data for tracking and measuring progress. The data will show if the company is moving in the right direction or if something needs to be changed for it to achieve the desired results.

Relationship management

Relationship management is divided into two parts. Internal relationships, which deal with the understanding of the company’s processes by the collaborators, take away that vision of “everyone does their own thing” and bring a broad perspective that involves everyone. And the second part is the external relationship that covers clients and suppliers. A good relationship must be cultivated not only with the client, but with its suppliers, who can bring good negotiations of prices, deadlines, and reliability in the contracts.

Streamline quality management processes

Maintaining quality is a never-ending process that demands constant monitoring, good communication between the involved parties, well-structured flows, and up-to-date documentation. Everything that has been done should be recorded, to keep a history of these processes and to know where the project stands.

To speed up management and make sure that the project is well documented, use process automation, make tasks no longer informal, and start following a flow with defined, standardized activities, providing control to managers.

Quality management needs to be valued

As the saying goes, “Better safe than sorry”. Unfortunately, some people still underestimate the importance of creating a quality management plan, since its main role is to prevent possible failures that may arise during the course of the project.

A well-designed quality management plan will bring not only results that are consistent with the project definitions but will also avoid major corrections, which cause rework and consequently costs to the company. Quality means valuing the customer, having committed employees, and an institution that is well seen in the market.

We have dealt with quality indicators in this article, so take a moment to go even deeper into this subject.

What about in your company, how is quality management carried out? Is there any indicators control? Answer here in the comments, we want to know your experience.