The document discusses quality management practices for projects based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). It defines quality as conformance to requirements and outlines planning, assurance, and control activities. Quality planning involves establishing measurable objectives, risk profiling, and expectation setting. Assurance ensures processes are effective through documentation, auditing, and continual improvement. Control establishes standards, ensures conformance, and tracks errors through statistical process control and cost of quality metrics to balance quality and costs. Best practices include fostering a quality culture and learning from past projects.
5. Q Planning
• Measurable Quality objectives should be established
– Cost of Quality objective
• Achieve a cost of quality 15% or better
– Error Rate objective
• Maintain errors per hour at 0.11 or better
Project quality objectives should align with corporate business
objectives derived from Management Review meetings
6. Q Planning
• Quality Planning should be a part of standard process
• Discuss any process needs (i.e., changes) up front before
production
• Meet with the team to discuss potential issues that will affect
project quality
• Develop Prototypes of the product:
– Enables client to see what the product will actually look like
– Product specifications are developed based on client feedback
of the prototype
Product specification deliverables are signed off by the client
before production
7. Q Planning
• Quality Risk Profile
– No two projects are identical
– Design your processes to be flexible, but not too flexible
– QAM meets with PM to discuss the potential to deviate
from the process e.g. this is the 780th time we’ve built
this, error rates are low and cost of quality is low, let’s
remove a review
– Must have measurable control limits
8. Q Planning
• Customer Satisfaction
Program
• Helps define and
measure quality of the
engagement
• Quality is often
attributed to products
only
9. Q Planning
• Expectation setting
– Choose top five quality metrics
– Communicate with project team
– Establishes vision, theme of priorities
Customer Satisfaction Worksheet
10. Q Planning
• Review Setting
– How did we do?
– Occurs periodically (every three months) or at
the end of the project (short duration projects)
– Results are recorded and shared with the team
11. Q Assurance
• All of the activities used to ensure that processes are
effective and relevant to the quality goals of an organization
• Measures the quality of processes used to create a quality
product
• Clearly written documentation, consistent processes,
training
• Auditing processes and procedures
• Incorporates both Quality Planning and Quality Control
12. Q Assurance
Continual Improvement
• Lessons learned meetings
• Use this information as input to the next Project Planning
meeting
Quality Culture—pride in workmanship
"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it" —
Edmund Burke, British statesmen and philosopher
13. Q Control
– Establishing standards for the product or service,
based on the customer needs, requirements and
expectations
– Ensuring conformance to these standards
– Taking action if there is a lack of conformance to
the standards
– Implementing plans to prevent future
nonconformance
15. Q Control
• Top errors are identified from the defect
database by the QA department (Pareto)
• Members of the QA department conduct root
cause analysis meetings with functional
teams (graphics, Instructional designers,
programmers) and PM
16. Q Control
• Cost of Quality
– Measures amount of time spend on: reviews, testing, and
rework (corrections) vs. total billable project effort
17. Q Control
• Balance Cost of Quality vs. Error rates
– Just because errors are high does not mean that
quality is bad
– Different errors require different effort
– Zero defects can be costly, there is such a thing
as too much quality control
– Establish balance, focus efforts on improving the
process, prevention rather than reacting to bad
quality
18. Best Practices
• Foster a quality culture
• Establish baseline processes
• Ensure that the team understands the project quality goals
i.e. error rates, cost of quality, customer satisfaction metrics
• Ensure that product specifications are clearly understood by
the team and the client
• Monitor project quality metrics and respond when they are
moving beyond control limits
• Conduct lessons learned meetings and infuse this
information into the next project
19. Recap
• Discussed elements of Quality Planning,
Quality Assurance, Quality Control
• Provided examples of tools and activities
used to ensure project quality goals are met
• Establish quality requirements up front
• Ensure that quality is measurable