Quality and benefits management
Quality and benefits management
This domain tests quality planning, assurance, control and benefit realisation.
Core rules
- Quality planning defines standards and acceptance criteria; quality assurance checks processes are followed; quality control inspects outputs against criteria.
- Prevention usually costs less than correction; use inspection, testing and sampling in control.
- Benefits are measurable improvements for stakeholders; map each to an owner, metric, baseline and realisation date.
- Benefits may accrue after the project closes; the programme or business owns realisation.
- Record dis-benefits and dependencies between benefits, and review benefits at gate reviews.
Worked example
A training project aims to cut invoice error rate from 8% to 3% within six months. Metric: error rate per 1,000 invoices. Baseline: 8%. Owner: finance operations manager. The project delivers training as an output; the benefit depends on staff applying it as an outcome. Reasoning: the benefit is not 'training delivered' but the measured error reduction.
Traps
- Calling delivery of outputs a benefit.
- Confusing quality assurance with quality control.
- No baseline or owner for benefits.
- Ignoring dis-benefits and unintended consequences.
- Assuming benefits appear automatically at go-live.