Chapter Five

Project Quality Management

 The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines quality as the totality of
characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.

 Other experts define quality based on

 conformance to requirements: meeting written specifications

 fitness for use: ensuring a product can be used as it was intended

Project Quality Management includes the processes required to ensure that the project will
satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken. The purpose of project quality management is
to ensure that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken. Recall that
project management involves meeting or exceeding stakeholder needs and expectations. The
project team must develop good relationships with key stakeholders, especially the main
customer for the project, to understand what quality means to them. After all, the customer
ultimately decides if quality is acceptable. Many technical projects fail because the project
team focuses only on meeting the written requirements for the main products being created
and ignores other stakeholder needs and expectations for the project.

Project Quality Management Processes

 Quality planning: identifying which quality standards are relevant to the project and
how to satisfy them

 Quality assurance: evaluating overall project performance to ensure the project will
satisfy the relevant quality standards

 Quality control: monitoring specific project results to ensure that they comply with the
relevant quality standards while identifying ways to improve overall quality

Project quality management must address both the management of the project and the
product of the project. The project management team should also be aware that modern
quality management complements project management.

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Modern Quality Management

 Modern quality management

 requires customer satisfaction

 prefers prevention to inspection

 recognizes management responsibility for quality

Quality Planning

Scope statement. The scope statement is a key input to quality planning since it documents
major project deliverables, as well as the project objectives that serve to define important
stakeholder requirements. It is an input for defining quality planning.

 It is important to design in quality and communicate important factors that directly

 Design of experiments helps identify which variables have the most influence on the
overall outcome of a process

 Many scope aspects of software projects affect quality like functionality, features, system
outputs, performance, reliability, and maintainability.

Quality standards can also apply to IT services. For example, you can set standards for how
long it should take to get a reply from a help desk or how long it should take to ship a
replacement part for a hardware item under warranty. The main outputs of planning quality
management are a quality management plan, a process improvement plan, quality metrics,
quality checklists, and project documents updates. A metric is a standard of measurement.
Examples of common metrics include failure rates of products, availability of goods and
services, and customer satisfaction ratings.

Quality management plan: The quality management plan should describe how the project
management team will implement its quality policy. It should describe the project quality
system: “the organizational structure, responsibilities, procedures, processes, and resources
needed to implement quality management”. The quality management plan provides input to

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the overall project plan and must address quality control, quality assurance, and quality
improvement for the project. The quality management plan may be formal or informal,
highly detailed, or broadly framed, based on the requirements of the project.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance includes all the activities related to satisfying the relevant quality standards
for a project. Another goal of quality assurance is continuous quality improvement. Input are
Quality management plan, Results of quality control measurements and Operational
definitions.

Several tools used in quality planning can also be used in quality assurance. Design of
experiments, as described under quality planning, can also help ensure and improve
product quality. Benchmarking involves comparing actual or planned project practices to
those of other projects to generate ideas for improvement and to provide a standard by which
to measure performance. The other projects may be within the performing organization or
outside of it, and may be within the same application area or in another. An important tool is
Quality audits help identify lessons learned that can improve performance on current or
future projects.

Quality assurance is all the planned and systematic activities implemented within the quality
system to provide confidence that the project will satisfy the relevant Quality standards. The
activities described under quality planning were widely included as part of quality assurance.
Quality assurance is often provided by a Quality Assurance Department or similarly titled
organizational unit, but it does not have to be. Assurance may be provided to the project
management team and to the management of the performing organization (internal quality
assurance), or it may be provided to the customer and others not actively involved in the
work of the project (external quality assurance).

Quality Control

Quality control involves monitoring specific project results to determine if they comply with
relevant quality standards, and identifying ways to eliminate causes of unsatisfactory results.

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 It should be performed throughout the project. Project results include both product results,
such as deliverables, and project management results, such as cost and schedule performance.
Quality control is often performed by a Quality Control Department or similarly titled
organizational unit, but it does not have to be.

 Inputs to Quality Control

 The main outputs of quality control are

 acceptance decisions

 rework

 process adjustments

 Some tools and techniques include

 pareto analysis

 quality control charts

 testing

Pareto Analysis

 Pareto analysis involves identifying the vital few contributors that account for the most
quality problems in a system

 Also called the 80-20 rule, meaning that 80% of problems are often due to 20% of the
causes

 Pareto diagrams are histograms that help identify and prioritize problem areas

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Sample Pareto Diagram

Quality Control Charts and the Seven Run Rule

 A control chart is a graphic display of data that illustrates the results of a process over
time. It helps prevent defects and allows you to determine whether a process is in control
or out of control

 The seven run rule states that if seven data points in a row are all below the mean, above
the mean, or increasing or decreasing, then the process needs to be examined for non-
random problems

Testing

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 Many SW professionals think of testing as a stage that comes near the end of SW product
development

 Testing should be done during almost every phase of the SW product development life
cycle

Improving Software Project Quality

Several suggestions for improving quality for Software projects include

 Leadership that promotes quality

“It is most important that top management be quality-minded. In the absence of sincere
manifestation of interest at the top, little will happen below.” (Juran, 1945). A large
percentage of quality problems are associated with management, not technical issues

 Understanding the cost of quality

The cost of quality is

 the cost of conformance or delivering products that meet requirements and fitness
for use

 the cost of nonconformance or taking responsibility for failures or not meeting

Cost Categories Related to Quality

 The Cost of Quality category codes are the following:

 Prevention Costs

Prevention costs are investments made ahead of time in an effort to ensure conformance to
requirements. Examples include activities such as orientation of team members, training, and
the development of project standards and procedures.

 Appraisal Costs

Appraisal costs are costs incurred to identify defects after the fact. Examples include
activities such as walk-throughs and testing.

 Internal Error Costs

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Internal error costs are the costs of rework and repair before delivery to a customer. An
example is fixing faults detected during internal testing.

 External Error Costs

External error costs are the costs of rework and repair after delivery to a customer. One
example would be rework and repair resulting from acceptance testing. Another example
would be the actual costs incurred during warranty support.

 Measurement and test equipment costs

Measurement and test equipment costs: capital cost of equipment used to perform prevention
and appraisal activities.

ISO 9000

 An international set of standards for quality management.

 Applicable to a range of organisations from manufacturing to service industries.

 ISO 9001 applicable to organisations which design, develop and maintain products.

 ISO 9001 is a generic model of the quality process that must be instantiated for each
organisation using the standard.

ISO 9000 certification

 Quality standards and procedures should be documented in an organisational quality

 An external body may certify that an organisation’s quality manual conforms to ISO
9000 standards.

 Some customers require suppliers to be ISO 9000 certified although the need for
flexibility here is increasingly recognised.

The End

Next......Chapter Six: Project Human Resources Management