KEVOS® Project Delivery Handbook
Planning Project Quality
In 1950, two American statisticians — W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran — arrived in post-war Japan to teach manufacturing methods.
In this handbook article
- Why Quality Cannot Be Inspected In
- What Is Project Quality?
- How It Works: Building Quality from Brief to Handover
- The Quality Management Plan
- Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control
- The Gap Analysis Model: A Lens for Total Project Quality
- The Four Gaps Explained
- Deming's 14 Points: The Philosophical Foundation
- Quality Across the Project Lifecycle
- The Pitfalls: Where Quality Management Fails
- Key Takeaways
Why Quality Cannot Be Inspected In
In 1950, two American statisticians — W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran — arrived in post-war Japan to teach manufacturing methods. Their central insight was revolutionary for the era: you cannot achieve quality by inspecting defects out of a finished product. Quality must be designed into the process from the beginning.
This principle transformed Japan into a manufacturing powerhouse and eventually reshaped Western industry. Yet decades later, projects still fail because quality is treated as an afterthought — a box to tick at the end rather than a discipline woven through every phase.
Graham Winch's research on the Glaxo construction project illustrates this vividly. The project — one of the UK's largest building projects in the 1990s — succeeded not because its inspections were thorough, but because the project coalition systematically closed four quality gaps throughout the lifecycle: the briefing problem, the design problem, the execution problem, and the conformance problem. Each gap represented a point where what the client expected could diverge from what the project delivered. The lesson is clear: quality management is fundamentally about minimising client surprise.
What Is Project Quality?
Quality is a deceptively simple word that carries multiple definitions depending on context:
| Perspective | Definition |
|---|---|
| Transcendent | Excellence — you know it when you see it |
| Product-based | Measurable superiority in product attributes |
| User-based | Fitness for intended use |
| Value-based | Quality relative to price |
| Manufacturing-based | Conformance to specifications |
| Organisational (ISO 9000) | What the organisation does to ensure delivered products or services satisfy customer requirements and comply with applicable regulations |
The AIPM Definition: Quality management ensures that the delivered products or services satisfy the customer's quality requirements and comply with all applicable regulations.
Within the PMBOK framework, project quality management is structured around three processes:
| Process | Phase | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Plan Quality Management | Organising & Preparing | Identify quality requirements and standards; document how compliance will be demonstrated |
| Perform Quality Assurance | Carrying Out the Work | Audit the quality requirements and results of QC measurements to ensure appropriate standards are used |
| Control Quality | Carrying Out the Work | Monitor and record results of quality activities; recommend necessary changes |
How It Works: Building Quality from Brief to Handover
The Quality Management Plan
The Quality Management Plan is the governing document. It answers five essential questions:
- What needs to go through a quality check?
- How will quality be checked? (Which tools and techniques?)
- When should checks be carried out?
- Who should be involved?
- How will continuous improvement be fostered?
The Plan draws its structure from ISO 9001 headings — document management, management responsibilities, design control, inspection and testing, corrective action, and quality audits — but should only be as detailed as the project requires. Overcomplicated quality plans become shelf documents that nobody reads.
The ISO 9000 Philosophy in Three Steps:
- Say what you will do
- Do it
- Prove that you did it
Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control
These terms are frequently confused. The distinction matters:
| Quality Assurance (QA) | Quality Control (QC) | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Process | Product |
| Timing | Preventive — applied during work | Detective — applied after work |
| Question | "Are we following the right processes?" | "Does this output meet specifications?" |
| Approach | Systematic activities to ensure confidence | Inspection, testing, and measurement |
On the Glaxo project, the Project Quality Plan (PQP) explicitly separated these functions. QA was defined as the programme of activities necessary to meet the project's requirements — establishing policies, procedures, standards, guidelines, and systems to produce quality. QC was defined as the specific implementation of those QA programmes, including checking and reviewing design-related activities to reduce errors and omissions.
Relationship details
| From | Relationship | To |
|---|---|---|
| Quality Policies | leads to | Procedures & Standards |
| Procedures & Standards | leads to | Quality Audits |
| Inspection & Testing | leads to | Measurements & Metrics |
| Measurements & Metrics | leads to | Accept / Reject / Rework |
| Quality Audits | leads to | Inspection & Testing |
The Gap Analysis Model: A Lens for Total Project Quality
Winch, Usmani, and Edkins proposed an alternative to traditional quality management by adapting the SERVQUAL gap analysis model (Parasuraman et al., 1985) to construction projects. Their model identifies four gaps that must be closed to minimise the project performance gap — the difference between what the client expected and what was actually delivered.
Relationship details
| From | Relationship | To |
|---|---|---|
| Client's Brief | Design Problem | Complete Definition of Building |
| Complete Definition of Building | Execution Problem | Complete Description of Building |
| Complete Description of Building | Conformance Problem | Completed Building |
| Completed Building | Project Performance Gap | Client's Requirements |
| Briefing Problem | leads to | Client's Brief |
| Client's Requirements | leads to | Briefing Problem |
The Four Gaps Explained
Gap 1 — The Briefing Problem: Translating the client's desires into a clear, actionable brief. On the Glaxo project, TKLP (the architects) spent a full year developing the brief, drawing on five data sources: Glaxo's own facility experience, TKLP's past similar projects, user group interviews, PAE's knowledge of UK codes, and relevant national standards.
Gap 2 — The Design Problem: Translating the brief into a complete building definition. This is iterative, moving from 1:200 building layouts to 1:100 detail drawings, with engineering designs evolving from general schemes to specific arrangements.
Gap 3 — The Execution Problem: Translating the design into a complete building description — the documentation package from which construction actually proceeds. The information flow here becomes sequential and reciprocal rather than iterative.
Gap 4 — The Conformance Problem: Ensuring that what is physically built matches what was described. This is where traditional quality control — inspection, testing, and verification — operates most intensively.
The Critical Insight: The line of visibility separates what the client sees from the internal workings of the project coalition. The key to client satisfaction is ensuring this line is positioned appropriately — deep enough that the client understands why changes occur, not just that they occur.
Deming's 14 Points: The Philosophical Foundation
While the PMBOK provides process, Deming provides philosophy. His 14 Points, published in Out of the Crisis (1982), remain the intellectual bedrock of modern quality thinking. Several are directly applicable to project management:
| Point | Principle | Project Application |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Create constancy of purpose toward improvement | Replace short-term reactive fixes with long-term quality planning |
| 3 | Cease dependence on inspection | Build quality into the process; do not rely on end-stage inspections |
| 5 | Improve constantly and forever | Embed continuous improvement into every project phase |
| 7 | Institute leadership | Lead quality culture, do not merely supervise compliance |
| 8 | Drive out fear | Teams that fear blame will hide defects rather than report them |
| 9 | Break down barriers between departments | Quality flows across functional boundaries; the "internal customer" concept |
| 14 | The transformation is everyone's job | Quality is not the responsibility of the QA manager alone |
Deming's Central Thesis: Variation is the enemy. The more variation in materials, processes, delivery times, and work practices, the more waste and defects. Reducing variation through process discipline is the path to quality.
Quality Across the Project Lifecycle
Relationship details
| From | Relationship | To |
|---|---|---|
| Concept | leads to | Planning |
| Planning | leads to | Implementation |
| Implementation | leads to | Finalisation |
The Pitfalls: Where Quality Management Fails
1. Gold-plating. Delivering more quality than the client asked for — or is willing to pay for — is not excellence. It is scope creep and budget overrun disguised as professionalism.
2. Confusing quality with grade. A low-grade product can be high quality (a simple pencil that writes perfectly). A high-grade product can be low quality (a luxury car that breaks down). Quality means conformance to requirements at the appropriate grade.
3. Quality plans that live on shelves. If the quality plan is too complex for the project team to follow, it will be ignored. As the guidance notes emphasise: use generic procedures where possible, match the format to the project's needs, and keep it current through formal change management.
4. Ignoring the briefing gap. Winch's research shows that the single most consequential quality decision occurs before any "quality activity" begins — it is the quality of the brief itself. A flawed brief cascades errors through every subsequent gap.
5. Treating quality as the QA manager's problem. Deming's Point 14 is unambiguous: quality transformation is everyone's job. On the Glaxo project, the client's deep involvement in resolving all four quality gaps — not just the conformance gap — was identified as one of the most important contributors to the project's success.
Key Takeaways
- Quality management spans three PMBOK processes: Plan Quality, Perform Quality Assurance, and Control Quality.
- QA is preventive (process-focused); QC is detective (product-focused). Both are necessary; neither is sufficient alone.
- The gap analysis model identifies four sequential gaps where client expectations can diverge from project delivery — briefing, design, execution, and conformance.
- Deming's 14 Points provide the philosophical foundation: build quality in, drive out fear, reduce variation, and make quality everyone's responsibility.
- The Quality Management Plan should answer what, how, when, who, and how to improve — and nothing more than the project requires.
- The line of visibility determines how much of the project process the client sees. Managing this boundary is critical to managing client satisfaction.