17 Project Quality Management

PROJECT QUALITY MANAGEMENT

 

IMPORTANCE OF PROJECT QUALITY MANAGEMENT

 

Quality management is centered on the management and control of producing fantastic products, and a business environment that will facilitate their production. Customer satisfaction is a very important part of quality control and this is an aspect of business that should definitely receive due consideration. It’s all about quality management, control, and improvement. When these three aspects are met, products can be manufactured with value in mind that will benefit both the customer and the company in a major way.

 

Control and improvement can be distinguished from in the following manner. Quality control is the ongoing effort to maintain the integrity of a process that will also help in maintaining the reliability of achieving a certain outcome. Quality improvement, on the other hand, is the purposeful change of a process that is designed to improve the reliability of achieving a specific outcome. Assurance is another important aspect and can be defined as the planned or systematic actions that are necessary to provide the confidence that a product or service will satisfy the given requirements that have already been set forth.

 

Quality management is used in all areas of a company from the products that are manufactured to the customer services provided by the employees. Team members often work on projects designed to improve the overall company’s value. It is an ongoing process, and is important to the success of a company. It can be implemented on several different levels. Companies must test the quality control of their products to make sure they are on par with what is expected. Customers who have purchased products or services from a given company for a period of time will expect a certain level of quality. That is why value management is a continual process that must be adhered to on a regular basis. It has also become a part of everyday operations for many businesses and is implemented into their normal agendas. The idea is that if products or services can continuously be improved upon, the longer the company who makes those products or services will remain in business. Moreover, many people discuss about the poor quality of Information Technology (IT) products. Since people rarely accept systems being down occasionally, it is necessary to provide customer satisfaction. This can be achieved by giving priority on prevention over inspection, increasing management responsibility and continuous quality improvement.

Project Quality

 

The ISO defines quality as “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills the  project  requirements”.  Here,  conformance  to  requirements  which  focuses  on  checking  whether the project’s processes and products meet the specifications. Moreover, it is necessary to check the fitness for use where the checking must focus on satisfying the constraint that whether a product can be used as it was intended. The following processes are included in project quality management.

  1. Quality Planning – Quality planning identifies the standards which are relevant to the project.
  1. Perform Quality Assurance – Performing Quality Assurance is the execution of the quality activities during project execution.
  1. Perform Quality Control – Performing Quality Control is the monitoring of deliverables to evaluate whether they comply with the project’s quality standards and to identify how to permanently remove causes of unsatisfactory performance.

PROJECT QUALITY PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT

 

Project quality planning and management activities consists of project management, process quality management, quality planning and quality management. Here, quality refers to the degree to which the characteristics of the product, service or result fulfill the requirements. Therefore, it must have zero variation from the customer’s expectations for scope, time and cost for hitting the target.

 

Project Management

 

The application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.

 

Process Quality Management

 

The processes and activities that determine quality polices, objectives and responsibilities so the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken.

   Quality Planning

 

The Quality Management activities focused on designing a system of policies, processes and procedures capable of producing products that will meet customer requirements .

 

Quality Management

 

The integration and coordination of management activities focused on ensuring the organization fulfils customer requirements predictably, consistently and reliability.

 

THE COMPONENTS OF A PROJECT QUALITY PLAN

 

A project quality plan may differ according to the nature of the industry or project but there are a few components that are found in all types of quality plans:

 

1.  Management responsibility: All quality plans are controlled by management and the quality of the project is the main responsibility of project managers.

 

2.  Documentation: Project management communication depends on documentation. A project’s quality plan describes how to manage and control the documents needed in the project.

 

3. Requirements scope The project plan contains the correct requirements for implementation to ensure the quality assurance team of the proper way to validate them. Through the requirements scope, the team knows how to test and determine those activities that need to get out of the scope. Testing requirements that are not part of the scope is a waste of time and effort of the provider.

 

4. Control of design: Oftentimes, there are design reviews to determine if the proposed technical design is correct. The design control specifies how the design phase is controlled because the client may come up with changes to the design which should be reviewed and signed-off.

 

5. Development control: Once the project starts, all processes and procedures shall be closely monitored to ensure that the team is progressing in the right direction.

 

6. Testing/quality assurance: An element describing the main quality assurance functions that helps in identifying clearly the quality objectives and the methods to achieve them.

 

7.  Risks and mitigation: All project management qualities identify project quality risks so they can prepare for appropriate mitigation plans to address potential risks.

 

8. Audits: Periodic quality audits can help determine if the products and processes adhere to the quality standards. The quality audits to measure compliance can be done by an internal or an external team.

  1. Defect management: Typically, there are defects during testing and quality assurance. A project quality plan needs to contain guidelines in managing these defects.
  1. Training requirements: Project team members need a skill gap analysis to identify the training needed at the start of the project. The quality plan needs to indicate the required training and how the staff can get them.

Project quality management is essential and a quality plan is a mandatory document in any project. There is no other way to measure delivery and process quality if your project doesn’t have a quality plan.

 

PROJECT QUALITY ASSURANCE

 

Perform Quality Assurance is the process for “applying the planned, systematic quality activities to ensure that the project employs all processes needed to met the requirements). This process itself is a meta process: It has to improve products and processes following the rule that “continuous process improvement provides an iterative means for improving the quality of all processes”

 

Quality assurance activities are those actions the quality team takes to view the quality requirements, audit the results of control measurements and analyze quality performance in order to ensure that appropriate quality standards and procedures are appropriately implemented within the project. The project quality assurance needs the following criteria to be satisfied.

  • Quality Metrics
  • Quality Checklist
  • Process Improvement plan
  • Quality Baseline
  • Updates in Plan
  • Change management
  • Requested changes
  • Corrective actions
  • Testing after corrections
  • Ensuring required quality

 

PROJECT QUALITY CONTROL

 

Quality control (QC) attempts to answer two questions: Firstly, is the project meeting its quality requirements and if not, how can this be addressed? The project management team should have a working knowledge of statistical quality control, especially sampling and probability, to help evaluate quality control outputs. QC is inspection-driven. QC requires the project manager and the project team to inspect the work that’s been done to determine if the work results are in alignment with the stated and implied objectives of the project scope. QC is all about keeping mistakes out of the customers’ hands. You and the project team must work diligently to ensure that all of the work is accurate, on-scope, and meets the objectives that customer has defined. And do it quickly. But QC takes time. It takes time to inspect the work. It takes time to redo the work. It takes time to check the work that’s been redone. And time is rarely on the project manager’s side. There are plenty of tools a project manager can use to assist with quality control. Here are three for now:

  • Ishikawa Diagrams: these are also known as cause-and-effect diagrams and fishbones, but Ishikawa sounds brainier. The point of these diagrams, regardless of the nomenclature, is to facilitate a conversation on why causes and contributing to a problem.
  • Pareto Chart: ever hear that 80 percent of your income comes from 20 percent of your customers? Or that 80 percent of your help desk problems come from 20 percent of your employees? That’s the 80/20 Principle and the Pareto chart shows the categories of failure within a system. Then we use 80 percent of our effort to attack the largest identified problems.
  • Control Charts: A control chart really shows normal distribution and allows us to track trends and adjust our mean when we reach goals and need to set new quality goals. The point of a control chart is that we can track trends over time. The criteria for quality control are Quality control measurements, Validation procedures, Defect repair, Preventive and corrective actions and Validated deliverables.

QUALITY PLANNING THROUGH DEFECT REMOVAL

 

It is Important to prevent defects by selecting proper materials, training and teaching people in quality and planning a process that ensures the appropriate outcome.

 

SCOPE OF IT PROJECTS

 

Scope Management is an important facet of any IT project management process. Most project managers’ only job is guarding the scope properly. They ensure that the scope is correctly planned and aptly documented in the Statement of Work document. However, they miss out on the critical difference between the project scope of work and scope of the product. The major criteria for scope of projects include functionality, system outputs, performance, system reliability, and maintainability.

 

QUALITY ASSURANCE TECHNIQUES

 

Quality assurance includes all the activities related to satisfying the relevant quality standards for a project. Benchmarking generates ideas for quality improvements by comparing specific project practices or product characteristics. A quality audit is a structured review of specific quality management activities. The quality control techniques namely acceptance decisions, review meetings, reworking, process adjustments and product testing can be applied on projects in order to enhance the overall quality.

 

TREND ANALYSIS

 

Trend Analysis is used in quality management since it performs analysis based on the following for predicting the future:

  • Study of past projects
  • Discussing about present status
  • Curve fitting
  • Statistical Analysis – Correlation Analysis
  • Statistical sampling involves choosing part of a population of interest for inspection.
  • This is needed when the population is too large be to be completely sampled.
  • The size of a sample depends on how representative you want the sample to be.
  • Application of tests of significance.

SIX SIGMA

 

Six Sigma is “a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving, sustaining, and maximizing business success. Six Sigma is uniquely driven by close understanding of customer needs, disciplined use of facts, data, and statistical analysis, and diligent attention to managing, improving, and reinventing business processes. Six sigma based quality control requires an organization-wide commitment at all levels. Often huge training investments but pay off in higher quality goods and services at lower costs. In this model, training follows the “Belt” system as in a karate class. It is an operating philosophy that is customer-focused and strives to drive out waste, raise levels of quality, and improve financial performance at breakthrough levels.

 

SUMMARY

 

Project quality management requires focus on the following:

  • Project quality using planning
  • Monitoring
  • Control
  • Statistical methods
  • Six Sigma