Establish and maintain the project’s quality and process-performance objectives.

When establishing the project’s quality and process-performance objectives, it is often useful to think ahead about which processes from the organization’s set of standard processes will be included in the project’s defined process, and what the historical data indicates regarding their process performance. These considerations will help in establishing realistic objectives for the project. Later, as the project’s actual performance becomes known and more predictable, the objectives may need to be revised.

Typical Work Products

1.    The project’s quality and process-performance objectives

Subpractices

1.    Review the organization's objectives for quality and process performance.

The intent of this review is to ensure that the project understands the broader business context in which the project will need to operate. The project’s objectives for quality and process performance are developed in the context of these overarching organizational objectives.

Refer to the Organizational Process Performance process area for more information about the organization’s quality and process-performance objectives.

2.    Identify the quality and process performance needs and priorities of the customer, suppliers, end users, and other relevant stakeholders.

3.    Identify how process performance is to be measured.

Consider whether the measures established by the organization are adequate for assessing progress in fulfilling customer, end-user, and other stakeholder needs and priorities. It may be necessary to supplement these with additional measures.

Refer to the Measurement and Analysis process area for more information about defining measures.

4.    Define and document measurable quality and process-performance objectives for the project.

Defining and documenting objectives for the project involve the following:

·   Incorporating the organization’s quality and process-performance objectives

·   Writing objectives that reflect the quality and process-performance needs and priorities of the customer, end users, and other stakeholders, and the way these objectives should be measured

5.    Derive interim objectives for each lifecycle phase, as appropriate, to monitor progress toward achieving the project’s objectives.

6.    Resolve conflicts among the project’s quality and process-performance objectives (e.g., if one objective cannot be achieved without compromising another objective).

Resolving conflicts involves the following:

·   Setting relative priorities for the objectives

·   Considering alternative objectives in light of long-term business strategies as well as short-term needs

·   Involving the customer, end users, senior management, project management, and other relevant stakeholders in the tradeoff decisions

·   Revising the objectives as necessary to reflect the results of the conflict resolution

7.    Establish traceability to the project’s quality and process-performance objectives from their sources.

8.    Define and negotiate quality and process-performance objectives for suppliers.

Refer to the Supplier Agreement Management process area for more information about establishing and maintaining agreements with suppliers.

9.    Revise the project’s quality and process-performance objectives as necessary.