What is a Quality Audit?
A quality audit is a structured, usually independent review of whether project activities comply with organizational and project policies, processes, and procedures — and whether those processes are themselves effective. It hunts good practices to share as much as gaps to fix, and it belongs to the QA (process) side of the house, not product inspection.
Best received when framed honestly: audits done for the project find cheap improvements; audits done to the project find hidden paperwork. The difference is culture, not checklist.
Worked example
The PMO audits a bridge project mid-stream: welding procedure compliance solid (and its qualification tracker so good it becomes the division template — a shared good practice), but nonconformance reports are closing without root-cause entries (gap, fixed with a form change), and one inspector's certs lapsed last month (gap, fixed that week). Cost of audit: three days. Cost of discovering the cert lapse during a claims dispute instead: unbounded.