What is Quality?
- Quality is a term which is very often misunderstood in projects.
- Quite often it is equated to adhering to quality standards or providing the best possible features to a product.
- Experts define quality based on conformance to requirements and fitness for use.
- Conformance to requirements means that the project’s processes and products meet written specifications
- Fitness for use means that a product can be used as it was intended
- According to the PMP, quality management in project management is defined as “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils the requirements.”
Quality Metrics
- A metric is a standard of measurement
- To achieve the desired quality, we plan quality activities, like reviews, inspections and testing.
- Outputs of these are called metrics, or measurements.
- These metrics are compared against what is an acceptable range in a project.
- Metrics allow organisations to measure their performance in certain areas and to compare them over time or with other organizations
- Examples of common metrics used by organizations include failure rates of products produced, availability of goods and services, and customer satisfaction ratings
Benefits of Project Quality Management
- Higher Levels of Customer Satisfaction - communicating with the customer will ensure they’re up to date and aware of any issues. Incremental customer feedback can also help you to deliver a better final product.
- Better Quality Products - This will help to deliver a final product that meets customer expectations.
- Increased Productivity - With a project quality management system everyone knows deadlines and what is needed in advance. Having set deadlines, meetings, and reports can influence the project team to hit targets early to keep the project on track.
- Financial gains - Projects can run over budget if good quality management is absent.
Quality Planning
- Quality planning includes:
- identifying which quality standards are relevant to the project
- how best to satisfy those standards
- Quality planning also involves designing quality into:
- the products of the project
- the processes involved in managing the project
- Like other plans, the size and complexity of quality management plans varies to meet project needs
Processes in Quality Management
Quality Planning
Here, the quality plan is created.
- Every plan should have a desired objective or goal, and quality plan is no exception.
- The goal of quality management should be clearly communicated to all the stakeholders in a project.
- After the goal is defined, the measures to ensure the level of standard should be identified.
- How are you going to measure the customer satisfaction?
- What is the level of quality that the stakeholders are expecting?
- How to determine if the quality measures will lead to project success?
Quality Assurance
This procedure will supply evidence to your stakeholders that all activities relating to quality are being done as has been defined and promised.
- Quality assurance is all about evaluating if a project is moving towards delivering quality services.
- This can be achieved via a project audit or process checklist, and tests.
- Both quantitative and qualitative metrics are used so that you can measure project quality and consumer satisfaction effectively.
Quality Control
Here, operational techniques are used to ensure quality standards.
- Any time a problem arises relating to quality or if the quality plan is not executed in the desired manner, corrective actions should be effective.
- Quality control involves monitoring project results and delivery to check if they are meeting desired results or not.
- If not, then alternative actions should be implemented.
- While quality assurance happens prior to a problem benignly identified, quality control is more of a reaction process, and so it happens once there has been the identification of a problem, with methods of improvement suggested here.
Quality scope
Quality management includes both looking out for:
- product quality (the system being created or maintained)
- process quality (are you following good practices?)
Many organizations use charts to keep track of metrics, such as a project dashboard: a graphical screen summarizing key project metrics
Quality costs
- Good quality often pays for itself in the long run
- Quality has more to do with prevention than inspection.
- When a product is made with better quality, then little effort and money needs to be spent in inspecting it.
- Work that carried out without many regards to quality, and there is a heavy dependency on inspection and the need to spend too much on rework.
- Avoids defects, rework, bad publicity, etc.
- It is also best to have in-process inspection at various points within the process while the product is being produced instead of final inspection.
- If a defect is caught early, it takes less time and money to fix it.
Cost of Quality
- Quality costs include cost of conformance and costs of non-conformance.
- Cost of conformance are all those costs that are expended in trying to achieve good quality.
- Cost of non-conformance are all those costs that are expended because the quality is not good
| Cost of conformance | Cost of non-conformance |
|---|---|
| Process improvement | Rework |
| Quality training | Scrap |
| Inspection | Loss of business due to adverse impact on brand image |
| Testing | Warranty / Liability costs |
| Litigation costs |
Cost of Quality = Cost of conformance + Cost of non-conformance
Optimum Point
If we invest, for example, £1 in the cost of conformance, and we tend to save more than £1 from the cost of non-conformance, then we reduce the CoQ.
- This continues until we reach the optimum level of quality.
- After this, additional £1 in cost of conformance gives less than £1 savings in cost of non-conformance.
- We always plan to achieve this optimum level of quality.
