Project Quality Management
Project Quality Management determines quality policies, objectives, and responsibilities so that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken.
Project Quality Management supports continuous process improvement activities as undertaken on behalf of the performing organization.
Quality is the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfill requirements.
Gradeis a category assigned to products or services having the same functional use but different technical characteristics.
Precision means the value of repeated measurements are clustered and have little scatter.
Accuracy means that the measured value is very close to the true value.
Cost of quality refers to the total cost of all efforts related to quality throughout the product life cycle.
Quality Philosophies associated to:
W. Edwards Deming– PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act), Quality is a Management problem, Started the TQM movement
Dr. Joseph Juran– 80/20 Principle, Fitness for Use, Quality & Grade
Phillip Crosby– Zero Defects, Quality is ‘Free’, Right’ the First Time, Prevention is the ‘Key’
Kaizen is a Japanese word that means gradual continuous improvement.
The knowledge area of Project Quality Management consists of the following three processes:
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Process Name
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Project Management Process Group
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Key Deliverables
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Plan Quality Management
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Planning
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Quality Management Plan, Process Improvement Plan
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Perform Quality Assurance
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Executing
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Change Requests
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Perform Quality Control
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Monitoring and Controlling
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Validated Deliverables, Validated Changes
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Plan Quality Managementis the process of identifying quality requirements and/or standards for the project and its deliverables.
Quality planning must consider cost-benefit tradeoffs by performing Cost-Benefit Analysis.
Cost of quality includes all costs incurred over the life of the product by investment in preventing non-conformance to requirements, appraising the product or service for conformance to requirements, and failing to meet requirements (rework).
Cost of Conformance– Money spent before or during project to avoid failures
Prevention Costs
Appraisal Costs
Cost of non-conformance– Money spent during and after the project because of failures
Internal Failure Costs
External Failure Costs
Seven Basic Quality Tools
Cause-and-effect diagrams, which are also known as fishbone diagrams or as Ishikawa diagrams
Flowcharts, which are also referred to as process maps because they display the sequence of steps and the branching possibilities that exist
Check sheets, which are also known as tally sheets and may be used as a checklist when gathering data
Pareto diagrams exist as a special form of vertical bar chart and are used to identify the vital few sources that are responsible for causing most of a problem’s effects
Histograms are a special form of bar chart and are used to describe the central tendency, dispersion, and shape of a statistical distribution
Control charts, are used to determine whether or not a process is stable or has predictable performance
Scatter diagrams, plot ordered pairs (X, Y) and are sometimes called correlation charts because they seek to explain a change in the dependent variable
Benchmarking involves comparing actual or planned project practices to those of comparable projects to identify best practices.
Design of experiments (DOE)is a statistical method for identifying which factors may influence specific variables of a product or process under development or in production.
Statistical samplinginvolves choosing part of a population of interest for inspection.
The Inputs, Tools and Techniques and Output of Plan Quality Management process are given below:
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Project Management Plan
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Cost-Benefit Analysis
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Quality Management Plan
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Stakeholder Register
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Cost of Quality
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Process Improvement Plan
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Risk Register
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Seven Basic Quality Tools
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Quality Metrics
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Requirements Documentation
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Benchmarking
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Quality Checklists
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Enterprise Environmental Factors
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Design of Experiments
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Project Documents updates
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Organizational Process Assets
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Statistical Sampling
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Additional quality planning tools
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Meetings
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Perform Quality Assuranceis the process of auditing the quality requirements and the results from quality control measurements to ensure that appropriate quality standards and operational definitions are used.
The key benefit of this process is that it facilitates the improvement of quality processes.
The quality metrics provide the attributes that should be measured and the allowable variations.
Seven Quality Management and Control Tools
Affinity diagrams is similar to mind-mapping techniques in that they are used to generate ideas that can be linked to form organized patterns of thought about a problem.
Process decision program charts (PDPC) used to understand a goal in relation to the steps for getting to the goal.
Interrelationship digraphs provide a process for creative problem solving in moderately complex scenarios that possess intertwined logical relationships for up to 50 relevant items.
Tree diagrams also known as systematic diagrams and may be used to represent decomposition hierarchies such as the WBS, RBS (risk breakdown structure), and OBS (organizational breakdown structure).
Prioritization matrices – Identify the key issues and the suitable alternatives to be prioritized as a set of decisions for implementation.
Activity network diagrams previously known as arrow diagrams. They include both the AOA (Activity on Arrow) and, most commonly used, AON (Activity on Node) formats of a network diagram.
Matrix diagrams used to perform data analysis within the organizational structure created in the matrix.
A quality audit is a structured, independent process to determine if project activities comply with organizational and project policies, processes, and procedures.
Process analysisfollows the steps outlined in the process improvement plan to identify needed improvements.
The Inputs, Tools and Techniques and Output of Perform Quality Assurance process are given below:
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Quality Management Plan
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Quality Management and Control Tools
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Change Requests
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Process Improvement Plan
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Quality audits
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Project Management Plan Updates
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Quality Metrics
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Process analysis
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Project Documents updates
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Quality Control Measurements
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Organizational Process Assets updates
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Project Documents
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Control Qualityis the process of monitoring and recording results of executing the quality activities to assess performance and recommend necessary changes.
Control Qualityshould be performed throughout the project.
Prevention (keeping errors out of the process); Inspection (keeping errors out of the hands of the customer)
Attribute sampling (result conforms, or it doesn’t)
Variables sampling (the result is rated on a continuous scale that measures the degree of conformity)
Statistical sampling (measures only a percentage of items e.g. 5 out of every 100)
Special causes (unusual events)
Common or random causes (normal process variation)
Tolerances (the result is acceptable if it falls within range specified by tolerance)
Control limits (the process is in control if the result falls within the control limits)
A deliverableis any unique and verifiable product, result, or capability that results in a validated deliverable required by the project.
An inspectionis the examination of a work product to determine if it conforms to documented standards.
Rule of Seven which is when 7 values in a row are all below or all above the mean or increase/decrease in one direction.
Quality control measurementsare the documented results of control quality activities.
The results of performing the Control Quality process are verified deliverables.
Work Performance Information is the performance data collected from various controlling processes, analyzed in context and integrated based on relationships across areas.
The Inputs, Tools and Techniques and Output of Control Quality process are given below:
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Project Management Plan
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Seven Basic Quality Tools
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Quality Control Measurements
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Quality Metrics
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Statistical Sampling
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Validated Changes
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Quality Checklists
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Inspection
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Validated Deliverables
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Work Performance Data
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Approved Change Requests Review
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Work Performance Information
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Approved Change Requests
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Change Requests
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Deliverables
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Project Management Plan Updates
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Project Documents
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Project Documents updates
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Organizational Process Assets
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Organizational Process Assets updates
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