Project management methods and quality standards

What is "quality" in development/humanitarian programmes and how can we set the "standards"?

“Quality” in programmes refers to the minimum standards that managers and teams must maintain in what and how they do programmes and the impact, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, accountability and transparency of outputs and processes achieved in all phases of programming and in all sectors of programme implementation. These standards are expressed in mandatory procedures, communication and planning systems of the organisation and/or donors, national laws, stakeholder requests, etc. Besides focusing on project performance, quality issues revolve around the team’s ways of working and relationships between the various players in the region, including areas such as performance management, fundraising, resource allocation, project management, budgeting, spending, human resources, organisational decision-making and programme support.

What quality relies on and why:	What we're doing to improve it and who's leading:
A Good Framework and Clear Standards	Programme Quality Overview Regional Programme Quality Frameworks Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning System Guide to Mandatory Procedures Control Self-Assessment - Gary Mitchell Risk Management - Gary Mitchell
Sound Analysis	Country Analysis/ National Change Strategies
Good Programme Design and Management	Project Cycle Management review
Working with Others	Putting the Partnership Policy Into Practice Strategic Evaluation of Partnership Donor Requirements for Partners
Staff with the right skills	Learning and development
Learn effectively from experience and put learning into action	Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning System Programme Resource Centre
Being fully Accountable	Sustainability Report/Social Accounts Complaints and feedback policy Accountability to Humanitarian Beneficiaries

Implementation framework for Programme Quality in South Asia September 2006 – September 2008

Project managers and core team members have at their disposal a very large number of methods, standards, and tools to assist them in their daily jobs. The multiplicity of methods can easily be explained by the fact that project management has become a mature discipline. Created during the First World War and increasingly used after the Second World War, this discipline has been on the rise especially over the last couple of decades. Its consistent growth has resulted in project management principles and methods being applied in the most diverse industries, and ultimately, in the need to develop specific methodologies, standards, and tools for each of these particular industries or sub-sectors.

What are project management methods?

Despite the dissimilarities among them, all project management methods include these basic elements:

Even when it is a fact that projects should be justified by a business case and that most projects are de-facto profit centers with a strong need for a business plan and a financial controller, the business dimension of projects is not always recognized to the point that some project management authors even think that the project team should only be concerned with the technical or operative information, leaving the financial aspects out of their knowledge.

The border between project management methods and tools

Is there really a need for a unique project management standard?

The main problem of standards is that they tend to interfere with the way companies are managed, often resulting in contradiction and confusion. At some point of our careers, probably most of us witnessed that the simple addition of in-house procedures to a project management method may result in heavy paper-work and a blocked system. By essence, projects imply some degree of innovation. Rather than rigid rules, some freedom should be given to people to support that innovation component. Also, as the application of project management principles grows in diverse countries around the world, cultural differences, local habits and norms, as well as different levels of risk acceptance make it difficult to have one sole standard that fits all needs. Given that it is simply not possible to run projects the same way in the UK, the US, France, Russia, the Scandinavian countries or Asian countries, it is unlikely that a common method gets recognized as a unique standard in the near future. For companies that want to become project-oriented organizations, it is often more reasonable to develop their own method, adapted from one of the main standards.

Some final thoughts

Our second recommendation is: make it clear. A project management organization necessarily implies a matrix-type of organization based on shared responsibilities between line managers (generally, the direct supervisors of all resources) and project managers (who usually have no direct responsibility on the people but are responsible for goal achievement). Not addressing these key problems is the source of many sterile debates, in which the project objectives are forgotten and the organizational problems derived from this become the center of the debate.

Our final recommendation on this subject is: give to the quality standard a higher priority than the one you give to the project management method. This is important since the ISO9000:2000 standard has become so widely adopted that it would not be wise to put in place any method that does not fully comply with it. As with everything in life, however, there are a few exceptions. The pharmaceutical industry, as a case in point, has its own quality standard called ‘Good Manufacturing Practices’ that is mandatory by law in most countries of the world.