Chapter 46: Introduction to Quality & Risk Management

Till now we have covered how to plan for a project scope, project resources and project procurement. The next planning we need to do is “Planning the Projects Quality & Risk”. In the next few chapters, we will be covering these in details.

So, lets get started!!!

Why Quality & Risk Management is Essential?

Quality and risk are two important interrelated aspects of any project that need to be managed. While quality refers to the degree to which a set of characteristics of project deliverables and objectives fulfill the project requirements, risk refers to an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on meeting the project objectives.

Consider the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1:

Your project just went live. You have created an online banking website for some bank in America and the website is live. As soon as customers start using the website, it is frequently crashing, customers are not able to view their account balance or perform fund transfer. All in all, the website isn’t meeting its required objectives. What went wrong here?

There was no quality management done. The quality of the work product delivered to the customer isn’t up to expectations and hence it’s a total disaster.

Scenario 2:

Lets say, you are on your way to deliver a major online banking website for a large bank in America. You are midway through the project and suddenly your Technical Lead has resigned. He was the center point for all technical discussions in the project and his departure is going to leave a big void and now people are worried that we may not be able to finish the project. What went wrong here?

There was no risk management done. Every project has its own set of inherent risks that may delay the project delivery and if we fail to plan for such risks, the project will be a total disaster.

After you have planned the project scope to the WBS level, as discussed in the previous chapters, you are ready to plan the quality and risk management. After the project starts executing, you will not have enough time to plan a response to a risk if it occurs, so you need to plan risk responses before the project starts executing. To do that, you need to identify the risks and analyze them.

So, the main things we will learn in this section are:
1. How do you plan for quality and risk management?
2. Learn how to plan quality
3. Identify and analyze risks
4. Plan risk responses.

This chapter is just an introduction and we will jump into the details in the subsequent chapters.

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