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Quality Management System

Definition

At InnoVius we consider quality management as a process for ensuring that all activities necessary to design, planning and implementation of tasks are effective and efficient with respect to the purpose of the objectives and their performance.

Quality management (QM) is not a separate, independent process that occurs at the end of an activity to measure the level of quality of the output. It is not purchasing the most expensive material or services available on the market. Quality and grade are not the same, grade are characteristics of a material or service such as additional features. A product may be of good quality (no defects) and be of low grade (few or no extra features).

We see quality management as a continuous process that starts and ends with the planned tasks — project. It is more about preventing and avoiding than measuring and fixing poor quality outputs. It is part of every project from the moment the project initiates to the final steps in the project closure phase. QM focuses on improving stakeholder’s satisfaction through continuous and incremental improvements to processes, including removing unnecessary activities; it achieves that by the continuous improvement of the quality of material and services provided to the beneficiaries. It is not about finding and fixing errors after the fact, quality management is the continuous monitoring and application of quality processes in all aspects of the project.

According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), quality has been defined as «the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.»

Quality management is not an event — it is a process, a consistently high quality product or service cannot be produced by a defective process. Quality management is a repetitive cycle of measuring quality, updating processes, measuring, updating processes until the desired quality is achieved.

Our first step on the quality management is to define quality, the manager and the team must identify what quality standards will be used in the project, it will look at what the donor, beneficiaries, the organization and other key stakeholders to come up with a good definition of quality. Quality management implies the ability to anticipate situations and prepare actions that will help bring the desired outcomes. The goal is the prevention of defects through the creation of actions that will ensure that the project team understands what is defined as quality.

As a second step we see quality assurance as activities for providing evidence to create confidence among all stakeholders that the quality-related activities are being performed effectively; and that all planned actions are being done to provide adequate confidence that a product or service will satisfy the stated requirements for quality. We see, Quality Assurance is a process to provide confirmation based on evidence to ensure to the donor, beneficiaries, organization management and other stakeholders that product meet needs, expectations, and other requirements. It assures the existence and effectiveness of process and procedures tools, and safeguards are in place to make sure that the expected levels of quality will be reached to produce quality outputs.

Our most popular tool used to determine quality assurance is the Shewhart Cycle. This cycle for quality assurance consists of four steps: Plan, Do, Check, and Act. These steps are commonly abbreviated as PDCA.

The four quality assurance steps within the PDCA model stand for:

  • Plan: Establish objectives and processes required to deliver the desired results.
  • Do: Implement the process developed.
  • Check: Monitor and evaluate the implemented process by testing the results against the predetermined objectives
  • Act: Apply actions necessary for improvement if the results require changes.

Quality assurance is often confused with quality control; quality control is done at the end of a process or activity to verify that quality standards have been met. Quality control by itself does not provide quality, although it may identify problems and suggest ways to improving it. In contrast, quality assurance is a systematic approach to obtaining quality standards.

Our goal with the quality control is to improve quality and involves monitoring the project outputs to determine if they meet the quality standards or definitions based on the project stakeholder’s expectations.

Based on client request

  1. International project management (Nordic customer is involved in the case in foreign country)
  2. Local project management (foreign customer is involved in the case in Norway)
  3. Foreign project management (based on requirement of foreign customer to be provide with service in that country)
  4. World-wide project management (based on team from different countries)

Though the quality improvement we refer to the application of methods and tools to close the gap between current and expected levels of quality by understanding and addressing system deficiencies and strengths to improve, or in some cases, re-design processes. A variety of quality improvement approaches exists and these approaches differ in terms of time, resources, and complexity, but at InnoVius we see the following four steps in quality improvement:

  1. Identify what you want to improve;
  2. Analyze the problem or system;
  3. Develop potential solutions or changes that appear likely to improve the problem or system;
  4. Test and implement the solutions;

The cost of quality is the sum of costs a project will spend to prevent poor quality and any other costs incurred as a result of outputs of poor quality. Poor quality is the waste, errors, or failure to meet stakeholder needs and project requirements. The costs of poor quality can be broken down into the three categories of prevention, appraisal, and failure costs:

    1. Prevention costs: The cost of preventing mistakes are always much less than the costs of inspection and correction.
    2. Appraisal costs: include the costs of verifying, checking, or evaluating a product or service during the delivery process.
    3. Failure costs: A project incurs these costs because the product or service did not meet the requirements and had to be fixed or replaced, or the service had to be repeated.

Quality management is not something that is done at the end of a phase or at the end of the project, is a continuous process to ensure quality is performed in all aspects of the project. The goal is to continuously improve based on the lessons learned and new insights provided by the project. To be effective it should happen during all activities of the project. The cost of quality is the sum of costs a project will spend to prevent poor quality and any other costs incurred as a result of outputs

By applying a process that continuously improves every element of the project, together with InnoVius you will achieve better results than trying to wait until the end of a phase or a midterm evaluation to start making adjustments and improvements to the work.

Applicability of Services

InnoVius has ambitions to develop business cases of Norwegian clients in all fields and worldwide – we like challenges, exploring and expanding of our network and gaining of new experiences.

Capacities

3 internal experts in business development (growing number), 5 collaborators in different fields, 7 national contact points, 3 matchmaking agents.

If you would like to order our services, please, ask for details and conditions at info@innovius.no