UNIT 5030 PLANNING AND MANAGING CONSULTANCY INTERVENTIONS

2.6 Evaluate the importance of the project leader quality assuring the work of the project team Quality Assurance (QA) is often a formal process within service contracts and projects. It can be taken to mean the maintenance of a desired level of quality in a service or product, especially by means of attention to every stage of the process of delivery or production. There has been a significant amount of research and study allocated to understanding more about the role of QA across the past several decades and such research tended to originate from major defence and aviation engineering projects whereby the cost of any failure could be human lives. QA has evolved to become the sub-discipline within Project Management that deals with compliance and conformity with agreed service levels as well as legal and technical requirements that could be stipulated by governments for within that sector. Many QA standards are so important that they have become refined and absorbed into expected rules and guidance codified by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). According to W. Edwards Deming, prominent business modelling expert, QA is a strict and formal discipline within any business to ensure the highest levels of professionalism and customer satisfaction (W. Edwards Deming: 2012).

According to ISO 8402:1996, i.e. Quality Management and Quality Assurance Vocabulary standard states that Quality is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or a service that bears on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.

According to ISO 9000:2000, i.e. the set of International Quality Standards and Guidelines for Quality Management Systems states that Quality is the degree to which a set of existing characteristics fulfil requirements.

Simply put, you can say that “quality is about meeting the customers’ requirements” and the deliverable being fit for use. When a product meets or exceeds customers’ requirements and needs one can say that the product is of high quality. Conversely, if it is not meeting its stated requirements the product