Chapter 14: Quality Management

Aim: To understand the Plan Quality process

Although the project manager has overall responsibility for quality, the entire project team plays a role in quality management. Every member of the project team must understand the importance of contributions, accept ownership for problems, be committed to monitoring and improving performance, and be willing to openly discuss issues among team members. Although specific techniques and measures apply to the product being produced, the overall project quality management approach applies to any project and is relevant to the project as well as the product being produced.

Exam Watch:
Understand the difference between quality and grade. Quality is a measure of how well the characteristics match requirements. Grade is assigned based on the characteristics that a product or service might have. So a product might be of low grade, meaning it has limited features, but might still be acceptable. Low quality is never acceptable.

Also, you need to understand the difference between precision and accuracy. According to the PMBOK, “Precision means the values of repeated measurements are clustered and have little scatter. Accuracy means that the measured value is very close to the true value. Precise measurements are not necessarily accurate. A very accurate measurement is not necessarily precise.”

The Plan Quality Process:

The plan quality process has a number of key inputs, many of which originate from other initiating and planning processes. The table below shows the inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs for the plan quality process.

Plan Quality
Inputs	Tools & Techniques	Outputs
Scope baseline Stakeholder register Cost performance baseline Schedule baseline Risk register Enterprise environmental factors Organizational process assets	Cost-benefit analysis Cost of quality Control charts Benchmarking Design of experiments Statistical sampling Flowcharting Proprietary quality management methodologies Additional quality planning tools	Quality management plan Quality metrics Quality checklists Process improvement plan Project document updates

The plan quality process incorporates various quality concepts with which you should be familiar. The following list highlights important key concepts in PMI’s quality management:
• The cost of preventing mistakes is generally less than the cost of repairing them.
• In order to be successful, management support for the quality program must exist.
• Quality is tied closely to the scope-cost-time constraints; without quality these objectives cannot be met successfully.
• The cost of quality refers to the cost to implement a quality program.
• Understanding and managing customer expectations is important to a successful quality program.
• The quality program should emphasize continuous improvement.
• There is a close alignment between the quality approach and the overall project management approach on a project.

Exam Watch
PMI’s definition of quality: “The degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfill requirements.”

You can learn more about the Plan Quality process by Clicking Here

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Next: Chapter 15

Chapter 78: Big Picture of Quality Management

Quality is an integral part of any project and a project delivered on time and within budget but of poor quality is as worthless as the project that is not delivered at all. Now, I guess you understand the importance of delivering stuff with good quality.

The big picture of controlling quality is illustrated in the picture below:

Controlling quality involves monitoring specific results to determine whether they comply with the planned quality standards, which include project processes and product goals, and controlling the results by taking actions to eliminate unsatisfactory performance. In other words, the Perform Quality Control process is used to monitor and control quality by accomplishing the following goals:

• Monitor specific project results, such as cost performance and schedule performance, to determine whether they comply with the planned quality standards, which include project processes and product goals.
• Identify ways to eliminate the causes of unsatisfactory performance.

The results under scrutiny include both deliverables and performance measurements by the project management team. Quality control is performed throughout the project. While dealing with quality control, you must be able to distinguish between the two terms in each of the following pairs:

• Prevention and inspection
• Prevention is a direction to perform an activity that will keep an error from entering the product and the process.
• Inspection is a technique to examine whether an activity, component, product, result, or service complies with planned requirements. The goal of inspection is to ensure that errors do not reach the customer.
• Attribute sampling and variable sampling
• Attribute sampling is a technique to determine whether a result conforms to the specified standard.
• Variable sampling is a technique to rate a result on a continuous scale that measures the degree of conformity.
• Common cause and special cause
• Common cause is a source of variation that is inherent to the system and is predictable. Such variations are also called normal variations, and the common causes for them are also called random causes.
• Special cause is a source of variation that is not inherent to the system and is removable. It can be assigned to a defect in the system.
• Control limits and tolerances
• Control limits is the area occupied by three standard deviations on either side of the central line or the mean of a normal distribution of data plotted on a control chart that reflects the expected variation of the data. If the results fall within the control limits, they are within the quality control.
• Tolerance is the range within which a result is acceptable if it falls within the limits of the range.

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