What is a Quality Charter and how does it differ from a Quality Plan?

[QUALITYTRAINER]

... and how does it differ from a quality plan?

 

[Miner]

Re: What is a Quality Charter?

Can you put this in context by providing additional information? For example, is this a project charter such as used in Six Sigma?

 

[QUALITYTRAINER]

Re: What is a Quality Charter?

I'm in a small service company and I am designing and implementing a quality management system for them that is ISO 9001 compliant. One of the things that management has asked me for (in addition to a quality plan and a roadmap for this effort) is for me to develop a Quality Charter. What they may be asking for is to define where the organization is going (relative to its quality efforts).

I may have just answered my question. What they may be asking for is an organizational wide quality program description for the masses in order that they could understand where we are going.

 

[Miner]

Re: What is a Quality Charter?

There might be some lessons from the project charter concept used in Six Sigma. The project charter is essentially a contract between the project leader and management that exists for the benefit of the project leader.

The essential elements (not in any particular order) are:

• A statement of the problem to be solved
• The metric by which the problem has been measured and by how success will be measured.
• The team responsible for the project
• High level timing (e.g., for each phase of the project)
• Potential project risks
• Scope (what's in scope, whats out of scope)
• Business benefits, customer benefits

These are fairly generic, so should be applicable to your situation.

I mentioned previously that this is for the benefit of the project leader. The charter helps you to manage expectations and to guard against scope creep.

 

[Marc]

Re: What is a Quality Charter?

... One of the things that management has asked me for (in addition to a quality plan and a roadmap for this effort) is for me to develop a Quality Charter. ....

Have you discussed what management expects? I do not remember having seen the term "quality charter" and I'm curious where they got the term and their expectations.