Last update: 12/2004
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What is QUALITY ASSURANCE?
Objectives
How does it work?
Achievements
Who benefits?
The role of IDABC
Technical information
Documentation
What is QUALITY ASSURANCE?
The QUALITY ASSURANCE project includes four types of activities:
- Development of Quality Guidelines and Generic Tools for the whole set of IDABC Projects of Common Interest (PCIs) and Horizontal Actions Measure (HAMs);
- Development of guidelines for Cost Benefit assessment of individual projects and horizontal measures;
- Evaluation of IDABC selected projects, including Cost Benefit analysis.
- The dissemination of the results throughout the IDABC community.
These activities aim to provide monitoring and advice during project implementation, as well as ex-post evaluations. The results are made available to the sectors/projects concerned and also to other administrative sectors. In this way, all participants in the IDABC Programme are informed of the lessons learned and mistakes to be avoided.
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Objectives
The QUALITY ASSURANCE activity aims to improve the manner in which project objectives and requirements are specified, and how individual projects are carried out, as well as the quality of the final project deliverables. It also evaluates key Projects of Common Interest and Horizontal Actions and Measures and the results of the IDABC Programme as a whole. At the level of the individual projects, the results of these evaluations should lead to corrective actions.
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How does it work?
QUALITY ASSURANCE Guidelines are meant to be an ongoing, centralised, implementation activity aimed at facilitating a common understanding and agreement of key project issues such as the formulation of user requirements, the definition of project objectives, roles and responsibilities, critical success factors, risks, constraints and organisational impact.
Framework contracts are established to provide quality control services to sectors and the central IDABC Unit on a 'call-off' basis. In this way, project managers have assistance in assessing the project quality plans and monitoring their execution, for measuring user satisfaction, determining the acceptance criteria for project deliverables and assessing deliverables against these criteria. Overall assessments of specific projects by means of cost-benefit analysis and end-user satisfaction measurement are also possible.
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Achievements
QUALITY ASSURANCE Guidelines have been developed. They consist in a self-evaluation tool in combination with short guides to the different phases of IDABC projects (Preparatory, Feasibility, Development and Validation, Implementation). Each of these short guides refers to a number of templates and checklists that can be used in each phase, such as for the project management and quality plan, user requirements, system requirements and guidance on metrics.
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Who benefits?
The IDABC community: The first direct impact of the QUALITY ASSURANCE will be the improvement of the quality of project deliverables of projects funded by IDABC, both in terms of compliance with project specifications and in terms of satisfaction of user expectations.
By providing transparency and accountability with regard to the programme management, it is also possible to say that the beneficiaries are more than just those directly involved in the IDABC Programme.
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The role of IDABC
The work is carried out under the responsibility of the IDA Unit which ensures that experiences from all the IDA projects are taken into account and that the results are disseminated accordingly.
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Technical information
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Project start date
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2001
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Project completion date
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2004
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IDA budget
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1999 € 133,000
2001 € 412,000
2002 € 219,000
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Responsible service
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DG Enterprise and Industry - IDABC Unit
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Project coordinator
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Contact
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idabc@ec.europa.eu
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Countries involved
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All EU Member States, Candidate and EEA
Countries
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Documentation on Quality Assurance and Project Assessment
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Other Horizontal Actions and Measures |
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