What is project quality management_

							What is Project Quality Management?

• Quality can be defined as “the totality of characteristics of
  an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied
  needs.”
• For IT projects, quality can be considered through two
  aspects:
   – Conformance to requirements – the project’s processes and
     products meet written specifications
   – Fitness for use – a product can be used as it was intended

• The purpose of project quality management is “to ensure
  that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was
  undertaken.”
What is Project Quality Management? (Cont.)

Project quality management involves three main
processes as follows:
  – Quality planning – identifying which quality
    standards are relevant to the project and how to satisfy
    those standards
  – Quality assurance – periodically 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
Quality Planning

• Communicating the correct actions for ensuring
  quality in a format that is understandable and
  complete
• Describing important factors that directly contribute
  to meeting the customer’s requirements such as:
   – Organizational policies related to quality
   – The particular project’s scope statement and product
     descriptions
   – Related standards and regulation
• Providing the main outputs such as:
   – A quality management plan
   – Checklists for ensuring quality throughout the project life
     cycle
Quality Planning (Cont.)

Important scope aspects of IT projects that affect
quality and should be included in quality
planning are:
   – Functionality (the degree to which a system performs
     its intended function) and features (the system’s
     special characteristics that appeal to users)
     Clarify what functions and features the system must
     perform, and what functions and features are optional.
   – System outputs (the screens and reports the system
     generates)
     Define clearly what the screens and reports look like
     for a system
Quality Planning (Cont.)
  – Performance (how well a product or service performs
    the customer’s intended use)
    Completely address all the requirements (such as
    volumes of data and transactions, the number of
    simultaneous users, speed of the response time and so
    on)
  – Reliability (the ability of a product or service to
    perform as expected under normal conditions without
    unacceptable failures) and maintainability (the ease
    of performing maintenance on a product)
    Define stakeholders’ expectations (such as the normal
    conditions for operating the system and providing Help
    Desk support)
Quality Assurance
• Goals of Quality assurance are:
   – To satisfying the relevant quality standards for a
     project
   – To continuously improve quality
• Tools for quality assurance are:
   – Benchmarking – a technique for generating ideas for
     quality improvements by comparing specific project
     practices or product characteristics to those of other
     projects or products within or outside the performing
     organization
   – Quality audit – a structured review of specific quality
     management activities that help identify lessons
     learned that could improve performance on current or
     future projects
Quality Control

The main outputs of this process are:
   – Acceptance decisions determine if the products or
     services produced as part of the project will be
     accepted or rejected. (If project stakeholders reject
     some of the products or services produced as part of
     the project, there must be rework.)
   – Rework is action taken to bring rejected items into
     compliance with product requirements or
     specifications or other stakeholder expectations.
     (Rework can be very expensive, so the project manager
     must strive to do a good job of quality planning and
     quality assurance to avoid this need.)
   – Process adjustments correct or prevent further quality
     problems based on quality control measurements.
Tools & Techniques for Quality Control

• Pareto Analysis involves identifying the vital
  few contributors that account for most quality
  problems in a system.
Tools & Techniques for Quality Control

• Statistical Sampling involves choosing part of a
  population of interest for inspection.
• Six Sigma involves five-phase improvement
  process called DMAIC, which stands for Define,
  Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
• Quality Control Charts & the Seven Run Rule
   – A quality control chart is a graphic display of data
     that illustrates the results of a process over time.
   – The seven run rule states that if seven data points in a
     row are all below the mean, above the mean, or are all
     increasing or decreasing, then the process needs to be
     examined for nonrandom problems.
Quality Control Chart