Introduction

The title of this chapter is Quality From the Ground Up because its important to build quality into your project right from the beginning. You can try to retrofit quality into your project later on, but its just never the same. So, now that you ve defined and organized your project, we re going to discuss the ways you can build quality into each phase of your project.

No one sets out to deliver poor quality results, but it happens all the time. These days, with corporate budgets being downsized and expenditures being thoroughly scrutinized and challenged, it s even more critical that projects deliver high-quality results. Lean economic times aren t the reason you should focus on building quality into your project, but they can certainly add pressure to do so. Whether your company is flush with cash or struggling to get by, your goal as the IT project manager should be to deliver the absolute highest quality result you can within the constraints of the project. It doesn t mean you necessarily deliver the absolute highest quality of all time, but the highest quality within the boundaries of your specific project. In this chapter, we ll explore this concept in more detail.

The biggest misconception about quality in any IT project is that it costs more money. That s not necessarily true and in fact, in 99.9% of the cases, it saves the company time and money far beyond the costs incurred. A study done by IBM in 1990 on the benefits...