Introduction to Project
Management
Chapter 8
Managing Project Quality
Information Systems Project Management: A Process and Team Approach, 1e
Fuller/Valacich/George
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Quality
• According to PMBOK, project quality is defined
as “the degree to which a set of inherent
characteristics fulfill requirements.”
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Importance of Quality
• Determined by industry or tolerance for error
• Critical: health or safety related
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Quality Within Project Management
• Required in all stages
– Initiation and closure
• Goals and level of achievement (lessons learned)
– Planning
• Determine ways to control quality
– Execution and control
• Feedback mechanisms to monitor and adjust
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Quality
• Can Be Applied To:
– The project team
• Sets performance expectations
– Processes
• Identifies ways to control quality
– Success level
• Allows team to determine the level of quality attainment
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Pioneers in Quality Management
• Deming
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
– Deming offered fourteen key principles for management for transforming
business effectiveness. In summary:
1.) Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of a product and service with
a plan to become competitive and stay in business. Decide to whom top
management is responsible.
2.) Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. We can no longer live
with commonly accepted levels of delays, mistakes, defective materials, and
defective workmanship.
3.) Cease dependence on mass inspection. Require, instead, statistical evidence
that quality is built in. (prevent defects instead of detect defects.)
4.) End of the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead,
depend on meaningful measures of quality along with price. Eliminate suppliers
that cannot qualify with statistical evidence of quality.
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Pioneers in Quality Management
5.) Find Problems. It is a management’s job to work continually on the system
(design, incoming materials, composition of material, maintenance, improvement
of machine, training, supervision, retraining)
6.) Institute modern methods of training on the job
7.) The responsibility of the foreman must be to change from sheer numbers to
quality… [which] will automatically improve productivity. Management must
prepare to take immediate action on reports from the foremen concerning
barriers such as inherent defects, machines not maintained, poor tools, and
fuzzy operational definitions.
8.) Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
9.) Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales
and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production that may
be encountered with various materials and specifications.
10.) Eliminate numerical goals, posters, slogans for the workforce, asking for new
levels of productivity without providing methods.
11.) Eliminate work standards that prescribe numerical quotas.
12.) Remove barriers that stand between the hourly worker and his right of pride of
workmanship.
13.) Institute a vigorous program of education and retraining.
14.) Create a structure in top management that will push every day on the above
13pts.
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Pioneers in Quality Management
• Juran
– Pareto Principle (80/20 rule)
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juran
“80% of a problem is caused by 20% of the causes).
This is also known as the "vital few and the trivial
many". In later years Juran has preferred "the vital
few and the useful many" to signal that the remaining
80% of the causes should not be totally ignored.”
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Crosby: Four Absolutes of
Quality Management
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Balanced Scorecard
• Developed by Kaplan & Norton
• 4 views of organizational activity
– Learning and Growth
– Business Process
– Customer
– Financial
http://www.balancedscorecard.org/basics/bsc1.
html
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Quality Standards
• ISO9000
– Quality management focus
• Customer quality requirements
• Regulatory requirements
• Enhance customer satisfaction
• Continual improvement
– www.iso.org
• Six Sigma
– To achieve Six Sigma, a process must not produce
more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities
– Champion, Master Black Belt, Black Belt, Green Belt
proficiency designations
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Certificates/Awards
• Total Quality Management (TQM)
– A description of the culture, attitude, and
organization of a company that strives to
provide customers with products and services
that satisfy their needs
– Emphasizes processes being done right the
first time and defects and waste eradicated
from operations
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IS/IT Quality
• Where do you focus?
• How do you measure?
• What is the return on investment?
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Quality Planning
• Quality planning
– The process of identifying relevant quality standards
and developing a plan to ensure the project meets
those standards
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PMBOK
Project Quality Management Inputs, Tools,
and Outputs
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PMBOK
Required Inputs, Tools and Techniques
Used, and Resulting Outputs During Quality
Planning
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Quality Planning – Inputs
• Enterprise factors
– Government regulations
– Standards or rules specific to organization’s product
or service
• Organizational process assets
– Quality policies/procedures/guidelines
– Lessons learned
• Project scope statement
• Project management plan
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Quality Planning – Techniques
• Cost/benefit analysis
– An evaluation of the costs and benefits of alternative
approaches to a proposed activity to determine the
best alternative
• Benchmarking
– Study of a competitor’s product or business practices
in order to improve the performance of one’s own
company
• Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
– Used to determine an organization’s capability with
respect to best practices within a specific industry
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Quality Planning – Techniques (cont.)
Capability Maturity Model
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Quality Planning – Techniques (cont.)
• Design of experiments
– Application of selected statistical techniques to test
the efficiency of certain project management
approaches by testing factors that may influence a
specific variable
– http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c030106a.as
p
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Quality Planning – Techniques
(cont.)
• Cost of quality analysis (COQ)
– Cost to improve or ensure quality measures, as well
as the cost associated with a lack of quality
– http://www.isixsigma.com/dictionary/Cost_Of_Quality497.htm
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Types of Quality Costs
Types of Cost
Examples
Cost of conformance
Prevention costs
Costs of training staff in design methodologies
Appraisal costs
Code inspection and testing
Cost of non-conformance
Internal failure costs
Costs of rework in programming
External failure costs
Costs of support and maintenance
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Reducing Software Quality Costs
• Avoiding any failure costs by driving defects to
zero
• Investing in prevention activities to improve
quality
• Reducing appraisal costs as quality improves
• Continuously evaluating and altering preventive
efforts for more improvement
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Quality Planning – Outputs
• Quality management plan
– A plan specifying how quality measures will be
implemented during a project
• Quality metrics
– Operational definitions of specific, processes, events,
or products, as well as an explanation of how they will
be measured in terms of quality
• Quality checklists
– Tools used to ensure that a specific set of actions has
been correctly performed
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Quality Planning – Outputs (cont.)
• Process improvement plan
– A plan specifying how to identify wasteful and nonvalue added activities
• Quality baseline
– The basis for which project quality is measured and
reported
• Updates to project management plan
– Incorporation of quality management plan outputs into
project management plan
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Quality Assurance
• The process of ensuring that the project meets
the quality standards outlined during the quality
planning phase
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PMBOK
Required Inputs, Tools and Techniques
Used, and Resulting Outputs
During Quality Assurance
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Quality Assurance – Inputs
• Quality management plan
• Quality metrics
• Process improvement plans
• Work performance information
• Approved change requests
• Quality control measures
• Implemented
– change requests
– corrective actions
– defect repairs
– preventive actions
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Quality Assurance –
Tools & Techniques
• Quality planning tools and techniques can be
applied
• Quality audits
– Structured and independent review activities
designed to review other quality management
procedures and to identify potential lessons learned
• Process analysis
– Examines how a process is performed
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Quality Assurance – Outputs
• Requested changes
• Recommended corrective actions
• Updates to organizational process assets
• Updates to the project management plan
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Quality Control
• The monitoring of project activities in order to
determine if specified quality standards are
being met
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PMBOK
Required Inputs, Tools and Techniques
Used, and Resulting Outputs During Quality
Control
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Quality Control – Inputs
• Quality management plan
• Quality metrics
• Quality checklists
• Organizational process assets
• Work performance information
• Approved change requests
• Deliverables
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Work Performance Information
• Status summaries of:
– Project deliverables
– Any collected performance measures
– Implemented changes from the original project
management plan
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Quality Control –
Tools & Techniques
• Cause and effect diagrams (Ishikawa)
• Control charts
• Pareto charts
• Flowcharts
• Histogram
• Run chart
• Scatter diagram
• Statistical sampling
• Inspection review
• Defect repair review
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Ishikawa (fishbone) Diagram
Sample
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Control Chart Sample
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Pareto Chart
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Quality Control – Outputs
• Quality control measurements
• Validated defect repair
• Updates to the quality baseline
• Recommended correction actions
• Recommended preventative actions
• Requested changes
• Recommended defect repair
• Updates to organizational process assets
• Validated deliverables
• Updates to project management plan
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Questions?
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