8 Project Quality Management

Includes the progress for incorporating the organization's quality policy regarding planning, management, and controlling project and product quality requirements in order to meet stakeholder's objectives.

Key Concepts for Project Quality Management

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).

Grade as a design intent is a category assigned to deliverables having the same functional use but different technical characteristics.

Prevention is preferred over inspection. The cost of preventing mistakes is generally much less than the cost of correcting mistakes.

Differences in meaning of terms:

• Prevention - keeping error out of he process. Inspection - keeping errors out of the hands of the customer.
• Attribute sampling - the result either conforms or doesn't conform. Variable sampling - the result is rated on a continuous scale that measures the degree of conformity.
• Tolerances - specified range of acceptable results. Control limits - identify the boundaries of common variation in a statistically stable process or process performance.

Cost of quality (COQ) includes all costs incurred over the life of the product by investment in preventing nonconformance to requirements, appraising the product or service for conformance to requirements, and failing to meet requirements (rework).

Failure cost are the cost of poor quality and are

• Internal - found by the project team;
• External - found by the customer.

Levels of quality management:

1. Let the customer to find the defects. Warranty issues, recalls, loss of reputation, rework costs.
2. Detect and correct the defects before the deliverables are sent to the customer as part of the quality control process. Appraisal and internal failure costs.
3. Use quality assurance to examine and designing of the project and products.
4. Incorporate quality into the planning and designing of the project and product.
5. Create a culture in the organization that is aware and committed to quality in processes and products.

Trends and Emerging Practices in Project Quality Management

• Customer satisfaction. Understand, evaluate, define, manage requirements so that customer expectations are met. Conformance to requirements + fitness to use.
• Continual improvement. Plan+Do+Check+Act (PDCA) cycle. Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma.
• Management responsibility.
• Mutually beneficial partnership with suppliers. Win-Win.

Tailoring Considerations

• Policy compliance and auditing. Policies, tools, techniques, templates.
• Standards and regulatory compliance. Specific quality standards in the industry, governmental, legal, regulatory.
• Continuous improvement. Organizational / project level.
• Stakeholder engagement.

Considerations for Agile/Adaptive Environments

Recurring retrospectives regularly check on the effectiveness of the quality processes. Adjustment or drop.

Focus on small batches of work, incorporating as many elements of project deliverables as possible to uncover inconsistencies and quality issues earlier in the project life cycle.