Quality of work

So, it’s a good idea to have a process for the project manager to check completed deliverables and give their informal approval. However, how can a project manager do so when they are not a technical expert?

This control is focused on making sure the deliverable satisfies its requirements and expectations. That can be translated into scope and quality. Before starting the work, you get help from technical experts to define the scope and quality of the deliverable and make sure they are aligned with the requirements and expectations. When the work is finished, you then help those technical people by reviewing their work based on the definitions to make sure nothing has been missed.

To be able to do so, you need to define scope and quality upfront, or at least just before work on each deliverable starts. For example, PRINCE2^® has an artifact called product description for this purpose, and P3.express uses comments in its deliverables map to store the information. Check your methodology to see how it’s done and whether or not it’s appropriate for your project; if not, tailor it by increasing or decreasing the level of detail and formality, turn it into a separate artifact, or merge it into an existing one, etc.

Agile projects usually involve writing down the items on sticky notes or index cards. One side can contain the user story while the other side contains the extra information about acceptance criteria. On the other hand, many of the items in IT development projects have similar acceptance criteria, and therefore, instead of repeating them, we can extract those common criteria and store them in a single element. That element is called a definition of done in many Agile systems.