Discussion on:

Inadequate quality management will result in project problems

Rather than just sending one person to a conference, find a conference that reflects something of your corporate approach, a business area in which you need to raise your profile, or is associated with an organisation you (or your customers) respectand sponsor it in some way. Some sponsorship deals are very cost effective - you can get advertising, good PR, public thanks from the organisers, reduced price (sometimes free) places for staff/customers, your company name/logo in a lasting publication - the proceedings.

Rather than just send someone to attend, another way to raise your profile and get into the procedings is to encourage a member of staff to write a paper on something your organisation has done. The member of staff gets recognition and so does the company. Straight sales pitches won't work but a "how we approached this challege to build this" will often be welcomed. Be prepared to admit you got it wrong in places and what lessons you learned - it actually adds to your profile as an open, thinking and creative organisation. Just make sure you don't give away the company secrets or ruin your brand marketing - check with your company experts.

One of the reasons projects continue to fail is because organisations don't learn from past projects.
Make sure that the findings of QC and QA are reviewed regularly. Look for causes in what they have found. Plan, try out and then implement appropriate improvement.
Separating QC from QA makes sense. They need a different skill set. QA in particular needs enough knowledge and experience to understand what is going on and work out if something needs to be done before the brown stuff hits. Good QA can help prevent project failures, QC only finds out what has gone wrong.