Technical Documentation of "Quality Management" Projects

© Ugur Akinci
“Quality Management” is yet one of the many employment opportunities available for technical writers today.
If you have not heard of QM before, here is a great blog entry by Irv Boichuk explaining the concept and how it relates to technical writing very well:

A technical writer is indeed an excellent person to document a quality management program. Doing so requires excellent organizational skills, attention to detail, an understanding of business processes, exceptional information-gathering skills, and an ability to translate researched information into useable documents.
But, just what is “quality management?” And what does documenting a quality management program involve? This article examines the concept of quality management and describes a ten-phase general process for documenting a quality program. Although this article does not attempt to cover all aspects of documenting a quality program, it aims to

• Help you determine whether such a project might be of interest to you
• Help you understand the scope of such a project
• Help you understand potential obstacles you might encounter
• Help you understand the types of documents you might develop for such a project
• Help provide a starting point for finding out more

With that, let’s take a look….

The Concept of Quality Management

Quality management means providing for our customer’s needs in a way that ensures the services or products they receive are the best we can deliver, every time. There are many different methods for achieving quality management within an organization: ISO, Total Quality Control (TQC), Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Hoshin, Kaizen, Best Practices, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), and many more.
Although each method has different techniques, tools, and structures, they all have a common purpose: Providing a comprehensive and fundamental strategy–or standards–aimed at continually improving performance by focusing on the needs of customers and all other stakeholders. You might think of standards as being the ruler for measuring the delivery of service or product.