A lot of traditional project management revolves around hand-offs or handshakes; Sign-off's and documentation.
The entire cycle from Requirements Gathering -> Analysis -> Design -> Functional Specification -> Sign-off can usually be shortcut by throwing the right people in a room with a few whiteboards and telling them to have a conversation.
In a past life, the company I worked for moved our Program Management Group under a VP who was tasked with improving product quality. His first initiative was to establish a "Product Creation Lifecycle" that involved passing 20+ gates before anything could be released. Each gate had upwards of 10 deliverables - The majority of which were never consumed. In theory it worked - We didn't release any more buggy code.
We didn't release anything at all.
We didn't release anything at all.
Good Project management is about how you can speed up all the feedback loops in your process and get business value to the customer.
So rather than thinking about "How do I stop getting bad quality software into a customers hands" - Focus on how fast you can get good quality features to them.
Less documentation and reviews. More conversations.
Less process. More good people.
Less handshakes. More group hugs.
