Chapter 29: Quality Management during Monitoring & Controlling the Project

Aim: To understand the Perform Quality Control process

In the project context, quality is not only defined as delivering the right thing at the right time and at the right cost, but also delivering to customer expectations. As such, you, the project manager, have to ensure that the required metrics, tolerances, reports, and checklists are in place to ensure a quality-prone execution and delivery sandbox is in place. The perform quality control process enables the project manager to assess the level of quality of the project’s deliverables and take any required action.

The table below shows the inputs, tools and, techniques, and outputs for the perform quality control process.

Perform Quality Control
Inputs	Tools & Techniques	Outputs
Project management plan Quality metrics Quality checklists Work performance information Approved change requests Deliverables updates Organizational process assets	Cause and effect diagrams Control charts Flowcharting Histogram Pareto chart Run chart Scatter diagram Statistical sampling Inspection Approved change requests review	Quality control measurements Validated changes Validated deliverables Organizational processes assets updates Change requests Project management plan Project document updates

Exam Trivia:
Some of the tools available to the project manager in controlling quality are

• The Ishikawa (also called the fishbone or cause and effect) diagram
• Control charts, such as the ones available using Three or Six Sigma
• Six Sigma—99.99% defect free or about 0.002 defective parts per million
• Three Sigma—99.73% defect free or about 2,700 defective parts per million
• Pareto chart (the 80/20 rule)
• Statistical sampling, such as the ones used in the standard audit processes

To more about the Control Quality process Click Here

Prev: Chapter 28

Next: Chapter 30

Chapter 21: Project Quality Management as part of Project Execution

Aim: To understand the Perform quality assurance Process

Quality assurance is the process of auditing quality requirements and the results from quality control measurements that are used to ensure the project employs all processes needed to meet requirements. It differs from quality control, which is monitoring specific project results to ensure they meet quality standards.

Exam Watch:

Even though the Perform Quality Assurance is part of the Executing phase and Quality Control is part of Monitoring & controlling, the output of Perform Quality Control is used as an input to Quality Assurance. Don’t get confused here. Both these activities happen hand in hand and the segregation between the Execution and Controlling phases is very slim.

The table below shows the inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs for the perform quality assurance process.

Perform Quality Assurance
Inputs	Tools & Techniques	Outputs
Project management plan Quality metrics Work performance information Quality control measurements	Plan quality and perform quality control tools and techniques Quality audits Process analysis	Organizational process asset updates Change requests Project management plan updates Project document updates

PMI stresses the importance of continuous improvement, which is an iterative process for improving quality. Continuous improvement is an ongoing cycle of process analysis leading to process improvements at which point further process analysis is undertaken. Process analysis is an in-depth look at what processes are being executed, how they are executed, by whom, and related processes.

The benefits of continuous improvement include reduced waste and reduction in non–value-added processes, leading to increased efficiency and effectiveness.

Work performance information is an important input to quality assurance. Work performance information is defined as data on the status of project schedule activities. It can include such items as technical performance measurements, project deliverables status, schedule progress, and costs incurred. This information can be used in audits, quality reviews, and process analysis. Other important inputs to quality assurance include approved change requests and quality control measurements. Approved change requests are any change requests that have been processed through the change management process and approved by the proper authority. Quality control measurements are the results of quality control activities.

Exam Watch:

1. Memorize and understand all the inputs to quality assurance.
2. The tools used in quality planning and quality control can also be used in quality assurance

Along with the tools used in quality planning and quality control, two other tools in quality assurance are quality audits and process analysis. Quality audits are independent reviews to verify compliance with quality standards. For example, a review team looks at control charts to determine if the processes were being controlled properly and if proper actions were taken when processes fell outside control limits. Process analysis supports continuous improvement as explained in the previous section.

Exam Watch:

Root cause analysis is a technique to examine a problem, determine the underlying cause of the problem, and implement corrective action to prevent further occurrence.

The application of quality assurance might result in changes to the project, which take the form of change requests or recommended corrective action. Updates are made to the project management plan and/or organizational process assets.

Prev: Chapter 20

Next: Chapter 22

Points to Remember: Project Quality Management

Quality is the measurement of how closely your product meets its requirements.

Whenever we talk about quality the following 3 terms invariably pop up. They are:

1. Customer satisfaction is about making sure that the people who are paying for the end product are happy with what they get. When the team gathers requirements for the specification, they try to write down all of the things that the customers want in the product so that you know how to make them happy. Some requirements can be left unstated, too. Those are the ones that are implied by the customer’s explicit needs. In the end, if you fulfill all of your requirements, your customers should be really satisfied.

2. Fitness for use is about making sure that the product you build has the best design possible to fit the customer’s needs. Which would you choose: a product that’s beautifully designed, well constructed, solidly built, and all-around pleasant to look at but does not do what you need, or a product that does what you want despite being really ugly to look at and a pain in the butt to work with? You’ll always choose the product that fits your needs, even if it’s seriously limited. That’s why it’s important that the product both does what it is supposed to do and does it well.

3. Conformance to requirements is the core of both customer satisfaction and fitness for use. Above all, your product needs to do what you wrote down in your requirements specification. Your requirements should take into account both what will satisfy your customer and the best design possible for the job. In the end, your product’s quality is judged by whether you built what you said you would build.

Quality Vs Grade

People often confuse Quality with Grade. Lets take a simple example: Watches...

Lets say Brand A is a popular brand of watches in India which costs Rs.2500 to Rs. 10000/- per watch whereas Brand B is an even popular brand which costs Rs.25000 to Rs.50000/-. Both brands make high quality watches but they are of different grade. As per their cost, people will value Brand A to be much lesser in monetary value than Brand B is. Hence Brand B is of a higher grade than Brand A. Nonetheless, if your Brand B watch fails to work after 3 days, its supposed to be of bad quality even though it is of very high grade.

Grade has nothing to do with quality. They are both two not-so-related terms which people tend to confuse often. As PMP Certified Project Managers, we must be able to tell them apart...

Now get the picture?

There are three processes in the Quality Management knowledge area, and they’re all designed to make sure that you and your team deliver the highest quality product that you can.

1. Plan Quality is like the other planning processes you’ve learned about—you create a Quality Management Plan to help guide you and your team through quality activities.
2. Perform Quality Control is the Monitoring & Controlling process where you look at each deliverable and inspect it for defects.
3. Perform Quality Assurance is where you take a step back and look at how well your project fits in with your company’s overall quality standards and guidelines.

Cost of quality is what you get when you add up the cost of all of the prevention and inspection activities you are going to do on your project. It doesn’t just include the testing. It includes any time spent writing standards, reviewing documents, meeting to analyze the root causes of defects, rework to fix the defects once they’re found by the team—absolutely everything you do to ensure quality on the project.

Metrics tell what and how you are going to measure your product’s quality. They give you some objective measures to help you make better judgments about it.

Validated deliverables and validated changes are two of the most important outputs of Perform Quality Control. Every single deliverable on the project needs to be inspected to make sure it meets your quality standards. If you find defects, the team needs to fix them—and then those repairs need to be checked, to make sure the defects are now gone.

Inspection means checking each deliverable for defects. That means checking your specs and your documentation, as well as your product, for bugs.

The better your Plan Quality, the less inspection you need.

Ishikawa diagrams help you to pinpoint the causes of defects.

The rule of seven means that any time you have seven data points in a row that fall on the same side of the mean on a control chart, you need to figure out why.

When data points fall above the upper limit or below the lower limit on a control chart, the process is out of control.

For the test, using any of the seven basic quality tools is usually a good indication that you are in the Quality Control process.

Ishikawa, fishbone, and cause-and-effect diagrams are all the same thing.

Scatter charts help you look at the relationship between two different kinds of data.

Flowcharts help you get a handle on how processes work by showing all of the decision points graphically.

Grade refers to the value of a product, but not its quality. So, a product can be low-grade by design, and that’s fine. But if it’s a low-quality product, that’s a big problem

Quality Audits are reviews of your project by your company. They figure out whether or not you are following the company’s process. The point is
to figure out if there are ways to help you be more effective by finding the stuff you are doing on your project that is inefficient or that causes defects. When you find those problem areas, you recommend corrective actions to fix them.

Process Analysis is when you look at your process to find out how to make it better. You use your process improvement plan to do this one.


Points to Remember - Other Topics:

Introduction to Projects & Project Management
Relationship Between Knowledge Areas & Process Groups
Project Integration Management
Project Scope Management
Project Time Management
Project Cost Management
Human Resource Management
Project Communication Management
Project Risk Management
Project Procurement Management
Ethics & Professional Responsibility

Points to Remember: Relation Between Knowledge Areas & Process Groups

Knowledge Area	Initiating Process Group	Planning Process Group	Executing Process Group	Monitoring and Controlling Process Group	Closing Process Group
Project Management Integration	Develop Project Charter	Develop Project Management Plan	Direct and Manage Project Execution	Monitor and Control Project Work Perform Integrated Change Control	Close Project or Phase
Project Scope Management	-	Collect Requirements Define Scope Create WBS	-	Verify Scope Control Scope	-
Project Time Management	-	Define Activities Sequence Activities Estimate Activity Resources Estimate Activity Durations Develop Schedule	-	Control Schedule	-
Project Cost Management	-	Estimate Costs Determine Budgeting	-	Control Costs	-
Project Quality	-	Plan Quality Management	Perform Quality Assurance	Perform Quality Control	-
Project Human Resources Management	-	Develop Human Resource Plan	Acquire Project Team Develop Project Team Manage Project Team	-	-
Project Communications Management	Identify Stakeholders	Plan Communications	Distribute Information Manage Stakeholder Expectations	Report Performance	-
Project Risk Management	-	Plan Risk Management Identify Risks Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis Plan Risk Responses	-	Monitor and Control Risks	-
Project Procurement Management	-	Plan Procurements	Conduct Procurements	Administer Procurements	Close Procurements

Points to Remember - Other Topics:

Introduction to Projects & Project Management
Project Integration Management
Project Scope Management
Project Time Management
Project Cost Management
Project Quality Management
Human Resource Management
Project Communication Management
Project Risk Management
Project Procurement Management
Ethics & Professional Responsibility

Points to Remember: Introduction to Projects & Project Management

Introduction to Projects & Project Management

1. Knowledge, performance, and personal skills are the three areas that project managers focus on to get better at their jobs.
2. When you’re talking about things like the people in your organization, the market you compete in, your company’s risk tolerance, and standards that your company needs to meet (like government-imposed standards for any contractor bidding on a government project), you’re talking about Enterprise Environmental Factors.
3. A program is a collection of projects that should be managed together in order to achieve a specific goal or benefit to the company.
4. A portfolio is a collection of projects or programs.
5. A project gathers a team together to do work that’s temporary, creates a unique result, and is progressively elaborated.
6. An operation (or process) is work that’s done in a way that’s repeatable and ongoing, but is not a project.

Organizational Structure

1. Functional managers have all the power in a functional organization. Project managers have the power in a projectized organization.
2. If a question on the exam doesn’t state an organization type, assume it’s referring to a matrix organization. That means the PM is responsible for making budgets, assigning tasks to resources, and resolving conflicts.
3. Project coordinators and expediters don’t exist in a projectized organization.
4. A project expediter keeps track of project status only.
5. A project coordinator has some authority, and usually reports to someone higher up in the company. Neither role has as much power or authority as a real project manager, even though an expediter or coordinator may have “Project Manager” written on their business cards.

Project Management Knowledge Areas

There are a total of 9 Knowledge Areas as per the PMBOK Guide. They are:

Integration Management: Coordinating all of the work so that it happens correctly. Making sure changes are approved before they happen.
Scope Management: Figuring out what work needs to be done for your project. Making sure your end product has everything you said it would.
Time Management: Figuring out the time it will take to do your work and the order you need to do it in. Tracking your schedule and making sure everything gets done on time.
Quality Management: Making sure you work as efficiently as you can and don’t add defects into the product.
Cost Management: Knowing how much you’re able to invest in the project and making sure you spend it right.
Human Resource Management: Getting the people to work on the team and helping them stay motivated. Rewarding them for a job well done and resolving conflicts that come up
Communications Management: Making sure that everybody knows what they need to know to do their job right. Tracking how people talk to each other and dealing with misunderstandings or miscommunications if they happen.
Procurement Management: Finding contractors to help you do the work. Setting the ground rules for their relationships with your company.
Risk Management: Figuring out how to protect your project from anything that could happen to it. Dealing with the unexpected when it does happen.

Points to Remember - Other Topics:

Relationship Between Knowledge Areas & Process Groups
Project Integration Management
Project Scope Management
Project Time Management
Project Cost Management
Project Quality Management
Human Resource Management
Project Communication Management
Project Risk Management
Project Procurement Management
Ethics & Professional Responsibility

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.

Prev: Introduction

Next: Controlling Quality

Chapter 48: Planning Quality

In the previous chapter, we saw the importance of planning for a projects quality. We saw a high level overview of how quality management happens in an organization but we haven’t jumped into the details yet. Well, this is the chapter where we jump into the ocean.

So, lets get started!!!

What is Quality?

According to PMBOK, quality is defined as the degree to which a set of characteristics of project deliverables and objectives fulfill the project requirements. Therefore, any characteristic that influences the satisfaction of the stakeholders is included in determining the quality. The project quality management processes include performing quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control. Quality planning is the quality process that is performed during the planning phase to accomplish the following goals.

• Identify which quality standards are relevant to the project at hand
• Determine how to satisfy these standards

The picture below explains this process:

Input to Quality Planning

The key input items for this phase of quality planning are:
Project performance baseline - The project performance baseline constituted by the scope baseline, schedule baseline, and cost baseline contains the list of all the deliverables and objectives to which the quality needs to be applied. For example, the following components of the project scope statement are especially relevant to quality planning:
• Project deliverables.
• Project objectives.
• Project requirements.
• A product scope description that may contain the details of technical issues and other quality-related concerns.
• Product acceptance criteria. The definition of acceptance criteria has an impact on the quality cost.

You find out the accepted schedule performance from the schedule baseline and the accepted cost performance from the cost baseline.

Stakeholder register and risk register - The stakeholder register may help in identifying the stakeholders that will have interests in quality. The risk register will help identify positive risks (opportunities) and negative risks (threats) that may have impact on deliverable quality.

Enterprise environmental factors - Guidelines, regulations from a government agency, rules, and standards relevant to the project at hand are examples of enterprise environmental factors that must be considered during quality planning. For example, procedures relevant to the application area of this project should be followed. Working or operating conditions and environment can also affect the project quality.

Organizational process assets - The following organizational process assets can affect the project from the perspective of quality planning:
• Information from previous projects and lessons learned
• Quality-related historical database
• An organizational quality policy, which is composed of overall intentions and high-level direction of an organization with respect to quality, established by the management at executive level

If the performing organization lacks a quality policy, the project team will need to develop a quality policy for the project. Once a quality policy is in place, it is your responsibility to ensure that the project stakeholders are aware of it and are on the same page.

Tools and Techniques Used for Quality Planning

The tools and techniques used for quality planning include benchmarking, cost/benefit analysis, experiment design, and brainstorming.

Benchmarking - Benchmarking is comparing practices, products, or services of a project with those of some reference projects for the purposes of learning, improving, and creating the basis for measuring performance. These reference projects might be previous projects performed inside or outside of the performing organization. Improvement and performance are of course quality-related factors. For example, you might have a similar project performed in the past that accepted no more than two defects in each feature. You might use that as a quality criterion or simply put a benchmark for your project.

Cost of quality and cost/benefit analysis - The cost of quality is the total quality-related cost during the lifecycle of the product. That includes the costs incurred in implementing conformance to the requirements, reworking due to the defects resulting from failure to meet the requirements, and updating the product or service to meet the requirements. The cost of performance consists of prevention costs and appraisal costs. Prevention costs include the costs of appropriate equipment, documenting and performing processes, time and effort to perform the project work the right way, and needed training of the team members. The appraisal costs include the costs of inspecting, testing, and loss due to destructive testing. Cost of nonconformance includes rework and waste of time and effort if the product is rejected internally because it did not meet the quality standards. If the problems with the product were found by the customer, however, the results could be more much more costly and damaging, including liabilities and loss of business.

During quality planning, you must consider the tradeoff between the cost and the benefit of quality and strike the appropriate balance for a given project. Implementing quality has its costs, including quality management and fulfilling quality requirements. The benefits of meeting quality requirements include less rework, resulting in overall higher productivity; lower costs of maintaining the product or service; and higher customer satisfaction.

Experiment design - Also called design of experiments (DOE), this is a statistical method that can be used to identify the factors that might influence a set of specific variables for a product or a process under development or in production. You look for optimal conditions by changing the values of a number of variables simultaneously rather than changing one variable at a time. By using the results from this technique, you can optimize the products and processes. For example, you can use DOE to strike the right balance between cost of quality and its benefits. During planning, DOE can also be used to determine the types of tests and their impact on cost of quality.

Other quality planning tools - Other tools that you can use in quality planning, depending upon the project, include brainstorming, flowcharting, control charts, and statistical sampling. Statistical sampling involves randomly selecting a part of the population for study. Control charts, flowcharting, and statistical sampling will be covered in great detail in future when we discuss Quality Control. Some other tools of quality planning are:
• Affinity diagrams - A business tool used to organize a large set of data and ideas into logical groups based on the relationships among these ideas.
• Force field analysis - A technique to understand the forces (factors) influencing a situation. It can be used to separate the forces that drive movement toward a goal from those that either block that movement or drive it away from the goal.
• Matrix diagrams - This method is used to explore the relationships between different entities, such as objectives and causes, by displaying these entities in a matrix, with cells of the matrix representing the relationships.
• Nominal group techniques - These are the decision-making methods that are used among groups of different sizes with two goals in mind: Make the decision quickly and take everyone’s opinion into account. One example involves decision making by a group of one size, then a review of all those ideas from brainstorming by a group of another size, and then making the final decision by a group of yet another size.
• Prioritization matrices - This is the method of prioritizing entities, such as problems, ideas, and issues, by using some ranking criteria.

Output of Quality Planning

The outputs of the quality planning process are:

Quality management plan - The quality management plan describes how the quality policy for this project will be implemented by the project management team. It includes approaches to quality assurance, quality control, and continuous process improvement. The quality management plan also contains the quality baseline that sets the criteria that specify the quality objectives for the project and thereby makes the basis for measuring and reporting quality performance. For example, a project that is finished on time, with everything delivered in scope, and that stayed within its cost is a project with high quality performance.
This plan becomes a component of the overall project management plan.

Quality metrics - This is an operational criterion that defines in specific terms what something (such as a characteristic or a feature) is and how the quality control process measures it. For example, it is not specific enough to say the defects in the product will be minimized. Rather, specifying something such as that no feature will have more than two defects is a measurable criterion and hence a metric. Some examples of quality metrics are cost performance, schedule performance, defect frequency, failure rate, and test coverage. The metrics that you set during quality planning will be used in quality assurance and quality control.

Quality checklist - A checklist is a structured tool used to verify that a predetermined set of required steps has been performed. The checklists can come in imperative form (“to do” lists) or in interrogative form ("have you done this" lists). Checklists are prepared during quality planning and used during quality control.

Process improvement plan - This plan describes how to improve some of the processes that will be used in the project. For example, one purpose of improvement is to prevent activities in the processes that are not needed for this project. This is accomplished by describing the purpose, start, and end of a given process, the input to the process, and the output of the process. This is equivalent to drawing boundaries around the process. The process improvement plan may also include some metrics used to measure the efficiency of the process.

Updates to project documents - During quality planning, you may end up making changes that will require modifying corresponding documents, such as the stakeholder register and responsibility assignment matrix (RAM).

Prev: Big Picture of Quality Management

Next: Big Picture of Risk Management

Chapter 47: Big Picture of Quality Management

Quality refers to the degree to which a set of characteristics of project deliverables and objectives fulfills the project requirements. In other words, it is the sum of project and product characteristics that help fulfill the requirements.

Simply put – Does the project or product meet its requisite purpose properly? If so, we can consider our product/project to be of good quality.

The broader goal of quality management is to ensure that a given project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken.

Quality management has two components:
1. Project quality management and
2. Product quality management.

While product quality management techniques depend upon the specific product that the project is going to produce, project quality management applies to all projects independent of the nature of the products.

While dealing with quality, you should be able to distinguish between the terms in the following pairs:
• Grade and quality - Grade is a category assigned to products with the same overall functional use but that differ in their technical characteristics and features, whereas quality is the degree to which the inherent characteristics of a product meet the requirements. Number of defects is an example of poor quality, whereas a limited number of features is an example of low grade.
• Precision and accuracy - Precision is a spread of different measurements of the same quantity, constant, or variable, such as gravity or cost. The smaller the spread of measured values, the better the precision. Accuracy is a measurement of how close the measured values are to the true value of the quantity. The closer the measured value is to the actual (or true) value, the better the accuracy of measurements.
• 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. So, the goal of inspection is to ensure that errors do not reach the customer.

Trivia:
PMI’s approach to quality management is intended to be compatible with that of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and is compatible with proprietary approaches to quality, such as those proposed by Crosby, Deming, Juan, and others. It is also compatible with proprietary approaches to quality management, such as continuous improvement, cost of quality (COQ), design reviews, failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), and the voice of the customer.

Project management and quality management have come a long way as separate disciplines of knowledge and practice. It should not come as a surprise that quality management is one of nine knowledge areas in standard project management. In a complementary way, both modern quality management and project management recognize the importance of the following critical points:

Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement means continuing to improve the quality through a process of planning for quality, implementing quality, auditing quality, and re-planning based on lessons learned or auditing. So really, quality improvement is an endless cycle, called a plan-do-check-act cycle as defined by Shewhart and modified by Deming. Performing organizations can also use techniques such as Six Sigma and TQM to improve the quality.

Trivia:
Methodologies like Six Sigma and ITIL are based on this concept of continuous improvement

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction can be a very vague notion that can mean different things to different parties. However, in project management and quality management, customer satisfaction means planned customer requirements are met. To achieve customer satisfaction in the real world, you need to understand, define, and evaluate the customer expectations and also manage those expectations, in addition to meeting the planned requirements. Otherwise, you might meet the planned requirements, and the customer may still be dissatisfied.

Trivia:
Customer Satisfaction is one of the key performance indicators for any project manager. A good project manager will not only deliver a good quality work product but also meet or strive to always exceed customer expectations and keep the customer happy and satisfied always. After all, Customer is King in any business.

Management responsibility

This refers to the responsibility of management to provide resources needed for the project team to succeed. Although all team members should be responsible for the success of their parts of the project, they cannot succeed without management responsibility.

Trivia:
A project team cannot deliver a product without the requisite logistics. A workstation, a server, a database and a network are all mandatory requirements for any product and it’s the responsibility of the management to provide these to their team members in order for the team to deliver the work.

Prevention over inspection

One of the fundamental tenets of modern quality management is plan, design, and build in quality as opposed to inspect in. The cost of preventing mistakes is much less than finding them through inspections and then fixing them. Therefore, cost of quality (COQ) is less in prevention than through inspection. The COQ is defined as the total cost of quality-related efforts throughout the product lifecycle.

Trivia:
The age old saying “Better Safe Than Sorry” speaks volumes.

Look at the image below to understand the high level quality management process:

The Quality Management process explained in the picture above has the following processes:

• Plan Quality - This process is used to identify which quality requirements and standards are relevant to the project at hand and to determine how to meet these requirements and standards, as well as how compliance to the quality requirements will be demonstrated.
• Perform Quality Assurance - This process is used to audit the fulfillment of quality requirements to ensure that the project employs all the planned quality requirements and standards.
• Perform Quality Control - This process monitors project results to ensure that they meet the agreed-upon quality standards and identifies ways to eliminate the factors that keep the project results from meeting standards—that is, to make recommendations for changes or actions.

The processes for quality assurance are used as part of executing the project, and quality control is used as part of monitoring and controlling the project. These processes are therefore discussed in forthcoming chapters. Quality planning is performed during the project planning stage and so we will cover that next.

Prev: Introduction to Quality & Risk Management

Next: Planning Quality

Chapter 46: Introduction to Quality & Risk Management

Till now we have covered how to plan for a project scope, project resources and project procurement. The next planning we need to do is “Planning the Projects Quality & Risk”. In the next few chapters, we will be covering these in details.

So, lets get started!!!

Why Quality & Risk Management is Essential?

Quality and risk are two important interrelated aspects of any project that need to be managed. While quality refers to the degree to which a set of characteristics of project deliverables and objectives fulfill the project requirements, risk refers to an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on meeting the project objectives.

Consider the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1:

Your project just went live. You have created an online banking website for some bank in America and the website is live. As soon as customers start using the website, it is frequently crashing, customers are not able to view their account balance or perform fund transfer. All in all, the website isn’t meeting its required objectives. What went wrong here?

There was no quality management done. The quality of the work product delivered to the customer isn’t up to expectations and hence it’s a total disaster.

Scenario 2:

Lets say, you are on your way to deliver a major online banking website for a large bank in America. You are midway through the project and suddenly your Technical Lead has resigned. He was the center point for all technical discussions in the project and his departure is going to leave a big void and now people are worried that we may not be able to finish the project. What went wrong here?

There was no risk management done. Every project has its own set of inherent risks that may delay the project delivery and if we fail to plan for such risks, the project will be a total disaster.

After you have planned the project scope to the WBS level, as discussed in the previous chapters, you are ready to plan the quality and risk management. After the project starts executing, you will not have enough time to plan a response to a risk if it occurs, so you need to plan risk responses before the project starts executing. To do that, you need to identify the risks and analyze them.

So, the main things we will learn in this section are:
1. How do you plan for quality and risk management?
2. Learn how to plan quality
3. Identify and analyze risks
4. Plan risk responses.

This chapter is just an introduction and we will jump into the details in the subsequent chapters.

Prev: Important Terms - Project Resource Planning

Next: Big Picture of Quality Management

Chapter 7: Project Management Knowledge Areas

In the previous chapter, we saw the project lifecycle in detail. In this chapter, we are going to take a look at the Project Management Knowledge Areas.

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Project Management Knowledge Areas

Managing projects requires applying knowledge, skills, and tools and techniques to project activities in order to meet the project objectives. You do this by performing some processes at various stages of the project, as discussed in the previous chapter. That means processes are part of the knowledge required to manage projects. Each aspect of a project is managed by using the corresponding knowledge area. For example, each project has a scope that needs to be managed, and the knowledge required to manage scope is in the knowledge area called project scope management. To perform the project work within the project scope, you need human resources, which need to be managed; the knowledge used to manage human resources is called human resource management.

I guess, by now you have a fair idea of where we are getting to.

Each process belongs to one of the nine knowledge areas:

1. Scope Management
2. Time Management
3. Cost Management
4. Human Resource Management
5. Procurement Management
6. Risk Management
7. Quality Management
8. Integration Management
9. Communications Management
10. Stakeholder Management (This Knowledge Area was introduced in PMBOK 5th Edition)

Each knowledge area has its own place in the project lifecycle and they are all equally important from a project managers point of view. In practical experience you might fine one or more areas to have a greater impact on the outcome of the project, but nonetheless they are all important and play a vital role in the success or failure of a project.

Let us now look at each of these knowledge areas in detail…

Project scope management

The primary purpose of project scope management is to ensure that all the required work and only the required work is performed to complete the project successfully. This is accomplished by defining and controlling what is included in the project and what is not.

Obviously, these activities are performed by using the corresponding processes. So, project scope management, in part, defines the work required to complete the project. It’s a finite amount of work and will require a finite amount of time and resources. These need to be managed as well. The other knowledge areas cover them.

Project time management

The primary purpose of project time management is to develop and control the project schedule. Any project has a timeline by which it is expected to be completed and a well managed project is expected to complete by the set timelines.

Trivia:
Even though project time management takes care of all requisite parameters to manage the timelines of a project effectively, in reality you might find that the project managers are running around like headless chickens trying to get the project completed on time. This usually happens almost always. As an efficient manager, we should ensure that we don't become one of those headless chickens.

Project cost management

The primary goal of project cost management is to estimate the cost and to complete the project within the approved budget. This is one of the important activities because our bosses wouldn't approve if we exceed our approved budgets and it might have severe repercussions. Not to mention, finishing a project within budget with money to spare will always help you during your own appraisal!


The resources needed to complete the project activities include human resources, which need to be managed as well.

Project human resource management

The primary purpose of project human resource management is to obtain, develop, and manage the project team that will perform the actual project work.


There will be situations in which your organization does not have the expertise to perform certain schedule activities in-house. For this or for several other reasons, you might want to acquire some items or services from a vendor Ex: Servers from IBM. This kind of acquisition is called procurement, which also needs to be managed.

Project procurement management

The primary purpose of procurement management is to manage acquiring products (that is, products, services, or results) from outside the project team in order to complete the project. The external vendor who offers the service is called the seller.

Project Risk Management:

Any work, that is done will always have some uncertainties that give rise to project risks, which need to be managed. A project risk is an event that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on meeting the project objectives. The primary purpose of project risk management is to identify the risks and respond to them should they occur.

The goal of risk management is to help meet the project objectives and to help avoid/handle situations that might compromise the project schedule or outcome.

Project quality management

Project quality is defined as the degree to which a project satisfies its objectives and requirements. For example, a high-quality project is a project that is completed on time and with all the work in the project scope completed within the planned budget.

Project integration management

The project is initiated, planned, and executed in pieces, and all those pieces are related to each other and need to come together. That is where integration management comes in. For example, integrating different subsidiary plans into the project management plan needs to be managed. Project integration management includes developing the project charter, developing the project management plan, directing and managing project execution, monitoring and controlling project work, performing integrated change control, and closing the project or a phase of a project.

While managing all the aspects of the project, you as the project manager, will need to coordinate different activities and groups, and for that you need to communicate.

Project communication management

It is absolutely mandatory for the success of the project that the project information is generated and distributed in a timely fashion and to all the stakeholders involved. Experienced managers would say communication is the most important aspect of a project and the most important skill a project manager must have. Without any doubt, communication management is certainly a critical component of project management and a common thread that runs through the project lifecycle.

Project Stakeholders Management

As of the PMBOK 4th Edition there was no such knowledge area. In fact, processes related to stakeholders were actually part of Communications Management. Considering how critical managing stakeholders is, to the success of a project, PMBOK 5th edition included a separate knowledge area for the same. Anyone who is involved with or impacted by a project is a stakeholder and this knowledge area deals with how the project manager is supposed to manage them.

As you can see, managing a project involves performing a set of processes at the various stages of the project. Accordingly, processes are grouped corresponding to these stages and the groups are called process groups.

Processes are part of the knowledge required to manage projects. Each of these processes belongs to one of the nine knowledge areas identified in the PMBOK Guide. So a process has a dual membership—one in a process group, indicating at what stage of the project the process is performed, and the other in a knowledge area, indicating what aspect of the project is managed by using the process.

Below is a table that relates these two aspects:

Now that we know all the processes involved in project management, we will next take a look at the Project Stakeholders.

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Next: Project Stakeholders