Friday, May 15, 2009

Control your Quality of your life

Managing quality on your life means that you must first understand the specific quality expectations of your aim and then put a proactive plan in place to meet those expectations. The "proactive plan" contains a number of elements -- the most important of which are the quality control and quality assurance activities that need to be performed.

Quality control and quality assurance are important concepts, yet most project managers have only a vague understanding of the meanings and the differences between these terms. It's actually pretty easy.

Quality Control refers to quality related activities associated with the creation of project deliverables that can improve your life for a better. Quality control is used to verify that deliverables are of acceptable quality and that they are complete and correct. Examples of quality control activities include deliverable peer reviews and the testing process to get your aim.

Quality Assurance refers to the process used to create the deliverables, and can be performed by your brain, friend, or even a third-party reviewer. Examples of quality assurance include process checklists and project audits. If your project gets audited, for instance, an auditor might not be able to tell if the content of a specific deliverable is acceptable (quality control). However, the auditor should be able to tell if the deliverable seems acceptable based on the process used to create it (quality assurance). That's why project auditors can perform a quality assurance review on your project, even if they do not know the specifics of what you are delivering. They don't know your aim, but they know what good processes look like.

Here's an example to drive home the point. Let's say a your brain asked the body to approve the Body building activities to get more healthy life. If you were another person, how would you validate that the requirements seemed complete and correct?

One solution would be for you to actually review the preparation and the activities and tool that requirements. If you did that, you would be performing a quality control activity, since your actions would be based on validating the deliverable itself.