Regarding operational quality management, is a signed acceptance protocol sufficient after the completion of IT projects? Is it beneficial to proactively monitor operational quality indicators of an already implemented project? What steps can be taken to establish an effective quality management plan to prevent any potential decline in the quality of services provided after project completion?
The Challenge: Managing Post-Implementation Service Quality
Project managers may sometimes face situations where customers are dissatisfied with the quality of services after project completion. This dissatisfaction can lead to financial consequences for the service provider due to penalties imposed by the customer.
How to deal with this challenge? To address this challenge, we use the „strategy of project management quality” tool in project management. This focuses on the qualitative indicators of ITIL processes: incident, problem, change, and order management.
How is it all managed? In the project planning phase – the strategy of project management quality, we defined which quality indicators (KPIs) we will monitor, which documents and systems we will use to monitor and evaluate KPIs, and which operational teams will be evaluated (handover vs. taking over operational teams).
In the next section, I will present a series of tips and recommendations that have demonstrated efficacy in practical applications.
Defining the Quality Management Framework
Additionally, we have developed a comprehensive checklist comprising questions pertinent to each phase of system and service handover or acceptance.
- Preparation Phase: Ensuring the readiness of the future operational team to take over systems and services.
- Implementation Phase: The primary responsibility remains with the current operational team while the future operational team learns and acquires knowledge from the existing team.
- Post-Implementation Phase: The new operational team assumes main responsibility, with the original team supervising the transition process (commonly referred to as shadowing).
Interview-Based Quality Verification
The quality manager conducts an interview-based checklist review with the future operations team. The results of this interview are subsequently reported to the project manager as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The operations team is required to meet the minimum threshold defined in the project’s quality management strategy at every phase. For instance, 90 percent of the questions must be answered during the interview, while the remaining 10 percent will be addressed in subsequent interviews. If the team fails to achieve this threshold, the interview for that particular phase will be rescheduled.
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Continuous KPI Monitoring and Reporting
Weekly evaluations were conducted on the operational quality parameters (KPI) for both the current and future operations teams. During the preparatory phase, an overview of the current status of the operational KPIs was provided. The initial KPI report serves as a baseline for monitoring the trend of operational quality parameters throughout the project implementation and post-implementation phases. The KPI report is distributed to the operational team leaders. If there is a decrease or deterioration in KPIs compared to the previous period, the quality manager schedules a meeting with the heads of operational teams to analyze the causes of the decline in operational quality parameters, define measures to address identified deficiencies, and implement preventive measures to avoid repeated quality declines.
For clarity, I will list several evaluated operational parameters:
- Incidents:
- total number of incidents, average resolution time (in hours), percentage of incidents resolved on time,
- number of critical incidents, response time (in minutes) and percentage of responses on time, resolution time (in hours) and percentage of incidents resolved on time,
- number of open incidents after the resolution deadline and percentage of the total number of incidents.
- Changes:
- total number of changes,
- successfully implemented changes: number and percentage,
- changes implemented on time: number and percentage.
- Problems:
- total number of problems,
- successfully resolved problems: number and percentage.
- Orders:
- total number of orders,
- orders implemented on time: number and percentage.
Conclusion: Sustaining Service Quality Beyond Project Delivery
Proactive operational quality management ensures that service excellence does not end with project closure.
By continuously monitoring KPIs and engaging both current and future operational teams, organizations can maintain stability, accountability, and transparency across transitions.
Ultimately, this approach transforms quality assurance from a one-time control activity into an ongoing, data-driven process that safeguards long-term customer satisfaction and operational performance.
František Šofranko has held various managerial and professional positions in ICT, including sales, marketing, SLM, and project management over the past 15 years. He serves as the Vice President for External Relations at the PMI Chapter Slovakia. He earned DTAG’s highest internal PM certificate – Executive PM. František actively participates in volunteer work, coaching, mentoring, organizing PM events, and is a member of the PM certification committee at T-Systems International. He has extensive experience managing complex international projects using classical, agile, and hybrid methods. Notably, he led a global transformation project involving the migration of over 50,000 servers to a new IT standard for system management and monitoring.