Quality Assurance and Quality Control are often confused and are thought to mean the same thing. The fact is, they’re not.
The main difference between Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) in Project Management is that the former is a prevention-driven process, while the latter is an inspection-driven process.
In other words, Quality Assurance (through the QA team) is about making sure that the project work to be done will meet the quality criteria. Quality Control, on the other hands, is about inspecting the work already done and making sure that it did meet the quality criteria (if not, then the QC team will identify ways to rectify the problem(s)). Put differently, Quality Control is about compliance to quality criteria in the work already done.
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