What is a Quality Management Plan (QMP)?
A Quality Management Plan (QMP) is a document that is used as a management tool. It describes a documented, structured system (DES QA System) of policies and procedures that assure the environmental data we generate or review is of sufficient quality to meet our needs. Policies and procedures, areas of application, and roles, responsibilities and authorities are the type of things that are defined in a QMP. The QMP also defines how we audit (check) the quality system. The overall goal of implementing the QMP is to produce defensible products and decisions. The QMP provides a Department-wide process to make it easier to consistently define quality needs for individual projects that different Department units may undertake. In dealing with the Legislature, the public, EPA and other stakeholders, using the QMP will allow us to define and defend the quality of data we use to make decisions. The QMP will describe how we decide when we need data of lesser or greater quality, allowing us both
