#8 PMP - Project Quality Management

#8 Project Quality Management

Project Quality Management includes the processes and activities of the performing organization that determine quality policies, objectives, and responsibilities so that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken. Project Quality Management works to ensure that the project requirements, including product requirements, are met and validated.

Quality and grade are not the same concepts. Quality as a delivered performance or result is “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfill requirements” (ISO 9000) [10]. Grade as a design intent is a category assigned to deliverables having the same functional use but different technical characteristics. The project manager and the project management team are responsible for managing the tradeoffs associated with delivering the required levels of both quality and grade.

The project management team should determine the appropriate levels of accuracy and precision for use in the quality management plan. Precision is a measure of exactness. Accuracy is an assessment of correctness.

In the context of achieving ISO compatibility, modern quality management approaches seek to minimize variation and to deliver results that meet defined requirements. These approaches recognize the importance of:

-          Customer satisfaction. Understanding, evaluating, defining, and managing requirements so that customer expectations are met. This requires a combination of conformance to requirements (to ensure the project produces what it was created to produce) and fitness for use (the product or service needs to satisfy the real needs).

-          Prevention over inspection. Quality should be planned, designed, and built into—not inspected into the project’s management or the project’s deliverables. The cost of preventing mistakes is generally much less than the cost of correcting mistakes when they are found by inspection or during usage.

-          Continuous improvement. The PDCA (plan-do-check-act) cycle is the basis for quality improvement as defined by Shewhart and modified by Deming. In addition, quality improvement initiatives such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, and Lean Six Sigma could improve the quality of the project’s management as well as the quality of the project’s product. Commonly used process improvement models include Malcolm Baldrige, Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3®), and Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI®).

-          Management Responsibility. Success requires the participation of all members of the project team. Nevertheless, management retains, within its responsibility for quality, a related responsibility to provide suitable resources at adequate capacities.

-          Cost of quality (COQ). Cost of quality refers to the total cost of the conformance work and the nonconformance work that should be done as a compensatory effort because, on the first attempt to perform that work, the potential exists that some portion of the required work effort may be done or has been done incorrectly. The costs for quality work may be incurred throughout the deliverable’s life cycle. For example, decisions made by the project team can impact the operational costs associated with using a completed deliverable. Post-project quality costs may be incurred because of product returns, warranty claims, and recall campaigns. Therefore, because of the temporary nature of projects and the potential benefits that may be derived from reducing the post-project cost of quality, sponsoring organizations may choose to invest in product quality improvement. These investments generally are made in the areas of conformance work that act to prevent defects or act to mitigate the costs of defects by inspecting out nonconforming units. Moreover, the issues related to post project COQ should be the concern of program management and portfolio management such that project, program, and portfolio management offices should apply appropriate reviews, templates, and funding allocations for this purpose.

Quality Management Processes

The knowledge area of Project Quality Management consists of the following processes:

Process	Project Phase	Key Deliverables
Plan Quality Management	Planning	Quality Management Plan, Quality Metrics
Perform Quality Assurance	Execution	Change Requests
Perform Quality Control	Monitoring and Controlling	Quality control measurements

Fundamental Relationships of Quality Assurance and Control Quality

Plan Quality Process

Plan Quality Management is the process of identifying quality requirements and/or standards for the project and its deliverables, and documenting how the project will demonstrate compliance with relevant quality requirements. The key benefit of this process is that it provides guidance and direction on how quality will be managed and validated throughout the project. The ITTO of Plan Quality Management process are given below.

Inputs	Tools and Techniques	Outputs
Project management plan	Cost-benefit analysis	Quality management plan
Stakeholder register	Cost of quality	Quality metrics
Requirement document	Seven basic quality tools	Quality checklists
Risk register	Benchmarking	Process improvement plan
Enterprise environmental factors	Design of experiments (DOE)	Project document updates
Organizational process assets	Statistical sampling
	Additional quality planning tools Brainstorming - Force field analysis - Nominal group technique - Quality management and control tools
	Meetings

Seven Basic Quality Tools

The seven basic quality tools, also known in the industry as 7QC Tools, are used within the context of the PDCA Cycle to solve quality-related problems:

-          Cause-and-effect diagrams, which are also known as fishbone diagrams or as Ishikawa diagrams. The problem statement placed at the head of the fishbone is used as a starting point to trace the problem’s source back to its actionable root cause. The problem statement typically describes the problem as a gap to be closed or as an objective to be achieved. The causes are found by looking at the problem statement and asking “why” until the actionable root cause has been identified or until the reasonable possibilities on each fishbone have been exhausted.

-          Flowcharts, which are also referred to as process maps because they display the sequence of steps and the branching possibilities that exist for a process that transforms one or more inputs into one or more outputs. Flowcharts show the activities, decision points, branching loops, parallel paths, and the overall order of processing by mapping the operational details of procedures that exist within a horizontal value chain of a SIPOC model

-          Checksheets, which are also known as tally sheets and may be used as a checklist when gathering data. Checksheets are used to organize facts in a manner that will facilitate the effective collection of useful data about a potential quality problem. They are especially useful for gathering attributes data while performing inspections to identify defects.

-          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. Unlike the control chart, the histogram does not consider the influence of time on the variation that exists within a distribution.

-          Control charts, are used to determine whether or not a process is stable or has predictable performance. Upper and lower specification limits are based on requirements of the agreement. They reflect the maximum and minimum values allowed. The project manager and appropriate stakeholders may use the statistically calculated control limits to identify the points at which corrective action will be taken to prevent unnatural 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, Y, in relationship to a change observed in the corresponding independent variable, X.

Design of Experiments (DOE)

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. DOE may be used during the Plan Quality Management process to determine the number and type of tests and their impact on cost of quality.

Additional Quality Planning Tools

Other quality planning tools are used to define the quality requirements and to plan effective quality management activities. These include, but are not limited to:

-          Brainstorming. This technique is used to generate ideas.

-          Force field analysis. These are diagrams of the forces for and against change.

-          Nominal group technique. This technique is used to allow ideas to be brainstormed in small groups and then reviewed by a larger group.

-          Quality management and control tools. These tools are used to link and sequence the activities identified

Perform Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance is done during execution of the project. It includes -

-          Process of evaluating overall performance on a regular basis

-          Re-evaluating quality standards

-          Quality audits - structured review of quality activities that identify lessons learned. These lessons learned are used for process improvement.

Perform Quality Assurance is 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 inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs of this process are:

Inputs	Tools and Techniques	Outputs
Quality management plan	Quality management and  quality control tools	Organizational process assets updates
Quality metrics	Quality audits	Change requests
Process improvement plan	Process analysis	Project management plan updates
Quality control measurements		Project document updates
Project documents

The quality assurance process implements a set of planned and systematic acts and processes defined within the project’s quality management plan. Quality assurance seeks to build confidence that a future output or an unfinished output, also known as work in progress, will be completed in a manner that meets the specified requirements and expectations.

Perform Quality Assurance also provides an umbrella for continuous process improvement, which is an iterative means for improving the quality of all processes. Continuous process improvement reduces waste and eliminates activities that do not add value. This allows processes to operate at increased levels of efficiency and effectiveness.

Quality Management and Control Tools

The Perform Quality Assurance process uses the tools and techniques of the Plan Quality Management and Control Quality processes. In addition, other tools that are available include:

-          Affinity diagrams. The affinity diagram 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. The PDPC is useful as a method for contingency planning.

-          Interrelationship digraphs. An adaptation of relationship diagrams. The 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). In project management, tree diagrams are useful in visualizing the parent-to-child relationships.

-          Prioritization matrices. Identify the key issues and the suitable alternatives to be prioritized as a set of decisions for implementation. Criteria are prioritized and weighted before being applied to all available alternatives to obtain a mathematical score that ranks the options.

-          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. Activity network diagrams are used with project scheduling methodologies such as program evaluation and review technique (PERT), critical path method (CPM), and precedence diagramming method (PDM).

-          Matrix diagrams. A quality management and control tool used to perform data analysis within the organizational structure created in the matrix.

Quality Audits

A quality audit is a structured, independent process to determine if project activities comply with organizational and project policies, processes, and procedures. Quality audits can confirm the implementation of approved change requests including updates, corrective actions, defect repairs, and preventive actions.

Process Analysis

Process analysis follows the steps outlined in the process improvement plan to identify needed improvements. . Process analysis includes root cause analysis—a specific technique used to identify a problem, discover the underlying causes that lead to it, and develop preventive actions.

Perform Quality Control

Control Quality is the process of monitoring and recording results of executing the quality activities to assess performance and recommend necessary changes. The inputs, tools and techniques and outputs (ITTO) used for Perform Quality Control process are -

Inputs	Tools and Techniques	Outputs
Project management plan	Seven basic quality tools	Quality control measurements
Quality metrics	Statistical sampling	Validated changes
Quality checklists	Inseption	Validated deliverables
Work performance measurements	Approved change requests review	Organizational process assets updates
Approved change requests		Change requests
Deliverables		Project management plan updates
Organizational process assets		Project document updates
Project documents		Work performance information
		Organizational process assets update

-          Prevention (keeping errors out of the process) and inspection (keeping errors out of the hands of the customer).

-          Attribute sampling (the result either conforms or does not conform) and variables sampling (the result is rated on a continuous scale that measures the degree of conformity).

-          Tolerances (specified range of acceptable results) and control limits (that identify the boundaries of common variation in a statistically stable process or process performance).

In Just-In-Time (JIT) Quality, the amount of inventory is zero. The inputs are made available, just when they are required. This reduces the storage cost.

The process of Analogous Estimation involves looking at the history of past projects, and use them to make estimates.

Kaizen Theory - Apply continuous small improvements to reduce costs and ensure consistency.

Marginal Analysis - You compare the cost of incremental improvements against the increase in revenue made from quality improvements. Optimal quality is reached when cost of improvements equals the costs to achieve quality.

Normal Distribution Sigma values

The value of sigma of Normal Distribution are given below. These are important for the exam.

Sigma	Percentage covered
One sigma	68.26%
Two sigma	95.46%
Three sigma	99.73%
Six sigma	99.99%

Based on the above table, we can see that in six sigma one out of 10,000 items can have defects. In three sigma, twenty seven out of 10,000 items can have defects.

Giving extras i.e. doing more than the project scope is called gold-plating. PMI does not recommend gold-plating.

Quality must be planned in and not inspected in. Prevention is more important than inspection.