Evans and Lindsay, in Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence point out five distinct perspectives for defining quality. They are transcendental, product-based and user-based as well as value-based and manufacturing-based. The authors discuss this topic in terms of defining product and organizational quality. There are parallels between defining quality in projects.
Transcendent quality
This perspective allows you to make a judgement about quality relative to a standard of excellence. This is a high-quality measure of quality and is usually a function all aspects that influence the perception of quality. This is your total package for projects. It could be judged by sponsors asking you to manage their projects, customers asking you by name, or whether your team loves working with you on your projects.
Product-Based Quality
Are all the details taken care? The product-based quality in manufacturing could be the thread count or how well things fit together. This perspective is what I use to view a project:
(1) Did the project manager do an excellent job managing details (communications and risk planning, resource planning etc.) (1) Did the project manager do a great job of managing the details (communications, risk planning, resource planning, etc.)
(2) Did all solutions meet the requirements or were some solutions unable to solve the problem in 80% of cases?
User-Based Quality
Customer always wins. This means that quality is determined by whether the customer gets what they want. Let’s say that two groups need the same IT solution. This is the best solution for group A and it is high quality. Group B is affected by limitations that aren’t relevant to group A and perceives this as a low-quality solution.
This also relates to the quality of the requirements written and implemented. Are they really meeting customer needs? Even though requirements are perfectly written, they can still be a poor quality job for the user-based perspective. This would occur if the requirements were not accurate and poor from the beginning.
The user-based perspective boils down to the precision and accuracy of requirements and how they are executed.
Quality that is Value-Based
People often choose to build a custom-built solution for a problem rather than looking at commercially available solutions. Project A and Project B both solve the same problem, and offer similar value when completed. However, Project B is twice as expensive. From this perspective, Project A offers twice the quality.
This could also impact resource allocation. People and tools that are properly placed at the right time and in the right places work better and cost less than ad hoc projects. This perspective does not care about the solution, but the return on investment.
Manufacturing-Based Quality (or Specifications Based Quality)
This is the level of conformance to specifications in business. A standard of quality is a tolerance specification of.236cm +.003cm. This is a conforming to the original scope or plan in projects. Scope creep is a sign of poor quality. So is being over or under budget or within the time limits set out at the beginning. This may be something EVM practitioners or project controllers can relate to. This perspective will ensure that you have high quality projects.
Another angle is how closely the solution meets the requirements. The User-Based perspective does not only address requirements, but it is more focused on what stakeholders want. This perspective assumes that high quality is possible if stakeholders have approved of your solutions to their needs. This could be achieved by taking a pre-conce
