QA QC

I have noticed that many professionals, and even very accomplished managers, tend to lump 'quality assurance and quality control' together as if they occur together and mean the same. In reality, QA and QC are two as different a concept as can be! I hope I will be able to dispel a bit of that confusion.

Every organization seeks to achieve higher quality in their work, whether it is a product or a service they offer. These organizations seek to maximize the ability to meet its goals with a minimum of mistakes, inefficiency, and waste. And why not, this endeavor has many long-term benefits: reduction of costs, a delighted client, good future business prospects, etc. The process to achieve this continuous improvement has several steps and is, however, usually mistakenly termed QAQC.

QA (Quality Assurance) is a set of activities (e.g. a quality audit) that are aimed to ensure that the processes followed in the organization are actually happening properly and meeting the objectives. For example, a document control audit to check if all correspondence is being filed properly at the right place for easy access and future retrieval is a QA exercise. QA also works to develop processes to better handle issues. For example, when a problem has been identified in the project execution, say drawings are being issued for construction without a mechanical engineer's review, the QA manager will then modify the project execution process to include a step that includes a review of drawings by a mechanical engineer. So, the bottom line definition is that QA is that it is process focused, that is, development of methodology and standards. The goal of QA is to find a problem in the processes and make sure the checks are implemented at the right level of detail.

QC (Quality Control), on the other hand, is the set of activities that evaluate the product. So, in the above mentioned example, the mechanical engineer checking the drawings is a QC activity. This activity is focused on finding defects in particular deliverables. In a production line, inspection and testing of a sample would be QC. Here the task is to find if the deliverable / product meets the stated level of detail and specification requirements. To stress the point - this is a fault finding activity.

Now, the confusion arises, I think, is because organizations are not sure about assigning responsibility for these two activities. More often than not, these activities are assigned to the same individual - the project manager. This is not the right approach, and I have seen many cases in my career where the final quality of the project suffers due to this.

In my opinion, the project manager should be only responsible for QA and not for QC. Of course, it also depends on scope of projects. For a $5M or less construction projects, the resources are usually strapped and the PM is forced to do both, and usually manages to do a good job. But, in projects, especially $50M+ projects, it will be near impossible for a PM to do both QA and QC and produce good results. There are too many details to consider and the focus shifts away from QA thereby compromising the project. For such projects, the PM should focus on QA and QA only. He/She should have the lead engineer or a third technically savvy engineer deal with the QC part of the project. When setting up the project the PM will need to put sufficient QC check points in his/her project execution strategy to ensure the 'fault finding' is adequately happening on the project and the quality of the final deliverables going out of the door meets (or exceeds) the quality standards promised to the client. His/her job is to constantly monitor the operations to make sure the QC checks and the recification is happening. On projects greater than $150M, there should be dedicated QA manager.