Is QA Improving Your Project Performance?
The Quality Assurance (meaning process, not test) team is critical to PM Office performance and optimization. In fact, it isn’t possible to operate a truly effective PMO without an equally effective QA organization (whatever its title). QA functions exist to help performing organizations (like the PM office) form baseline best practices into lean and easy to use procedures, templates, checklists, and other tools, and then to track their compliance and facilitate performance improvement. In too many cases though, these facilitators become process dictators, and real quality performance suffers as a result.
The best QA’s are expert facilitators that 1. guide performing organizations to measurable performance improvement, 2. engender a positive culture of quality, and 3. reward those in the PM Office that show a commitment to excellence and/or produce real performance improvement. Top QA teams position themselves as support (enabling) organizations to the functions they seek to improve. It has to be this way, since the entire reason for the QA to exist at all, is to elevate the level of excellence achieved by other functions (like the PMO), and not the QA itself.
In fact, the QA role could be compared to that of a trusted and capable assistant to a top level executive. The assistant exists to enable the executive, not to act as a stand in or replacement, and not to provide independent leadership. Similarly, the QA function exists to assist PMO organizations and PM’s in optimizing their performance, but not to replace or stand in for them when it comes to defining “how they do what they do” and/or “what metrics they use to gauge success”.
That point is worth making because in too many organizations, the QA team steps outside the role of an enabling organization, and into a governing role – big mistake. In these situations, QA takes a leadership role in how process is written, how performance is measured, and how compliance is enforced. In effect QA is allowed to dictate how the performing function (i.e. PMO) does its work, often with executive management supporting this unnatural order. So what’s wrong with this approach?
Of course the PMO will still be held accountable for project outcomes and performance, so they’ll have to serve 2 bosses, 1. The QA team in terms of keeping up a set of artifacts, reviews, and other activities required to show compliance, and 2. Executive management in terms of real outcomes and performance. This inevitably produces cynicism within the PMO instead of a culture of quality and sends the message to them that they aren’t trusted to produce project excellence. As a result, PMO staff will pay lip service to QA standards while working around them, and will never take responsibility for process and/or process improvement. It’s executive management’s job to delegate authority and establish accountability, and in this kind of dynamic, they’ve laid a solid groundwork for mediocrity. There’s no way to interpret such outcomes as anything less than a complete failure on the part of executive management and QA.
When the QA team is allowed to assert authority over front line PM office leadership, it results in reduced performance and a general lack of respect for QA and process. It sends the message to project managers, that executive management places its trust in their compliance to process written by others, as opposed to the PM’s personal accountability for the outcomes they produce.
That’s why the PM team “must author and own the procedures they follow”. QA is there only to drive compliance to process and closure on improvement actions. This forces the PM’s to become partners with QA in quality, to take responsibility for process and related outcomes, and engenders a much greater degree of buy in and support for QA and process within the PMO.
So what should happen? Executive management must limit QA responsibility to management of the quality management system (process, templates, …), performing audits and other compliance activities, and root cause/performance improvement efforts. The processes, templates, and other quality tools themselves must be owned by the PM office, who should be held accountable for the outcomes they produce. That forces PM office personnel to take ownership for their own performance and performance improvement since they know that executive management expects them to show real progress in those areas. By contrast, the QA team plays the role of an independent third party reporting on compliance and improvement activities.
In the final analysis, while the QA is about “PMO quality and performance”, the job of achieving real gains in “quality and performance” is not about the QA, it’s about the PM office. Executives that understand that dynamic are in a much better position to engineer an organization with the right built in motivations and priorities.
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