Project quality management—an overview

Within PMB0K Guide (2008: 189) project quality management is described as: "the processes and activities of the performing organisation that determine quality policies, objectives and responsibilities, so that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken." As such, project quality management is as much about the quality, i.e. fitness for purpose of the outcome or product, as it is about quality of the management of the project.

Within the PMBOK Guide, project quality management is built around the processes of:
* plan quality — identifying the standards, tools, processes, as well as responsibilities,
that are needed to achieve a satisfactory outcome
* perform quality assurance — the audits and checking needed to ensure the plan is being
followed and that the correct behaviour toward processes and continuous improvement
are exhibited
* perform quality control — the checking and analysis of processes and outcomes to
ensure compliance with project requirements.

The term 'quality' is quite different to the quality that people in the street discuss. People in the street generally use the term quality to mean what quality management calls the grade. Grade is a measure of the features of a product.

Another set of terms that need defining are 'precision' and 'accuracy'. Within the quality field, these terms have specific meanings. Precision refers to the repeatability of a process or manufacturing step. Accuracy refers to how close the process comes to producing products that meet specifications. Accuracy is a measure of the product, and precision is a measure of the process.

The premise of Deming and Juran was that managers have a responsibility for efficiently achieving quality, and that the way to efficiently achieve quality is to firstly make the process repeatable (obtain precision), and to then to improve accuracy within the process.

Quality has to be designed into the process, through changes to the processes and equipment. While this increases the cost of production, it reduces the cost of rejects even more. The project quality process, starts with gathering, documenting and agreeing stakeholder expectations (the requirements); continues through a range of one-off tasks such as design; includes some manufacturing or building (process) activities; and completes with the customer acceptance (validation) that the products or deliverables meet the original needs.

Quality assurance is a term that has been coined to focus the quality activities earlier in the production cycle. It is an attempt to assure that the process always produces accurate products at each step, and that there are no rejects, and no need for quality control at the end. By performing activities during production, it is possible to identify which production steps are causing the problems, and to correct these problems prior to reject products being produced. Quality assurance generally increases the cost of quality equipment and quality-related activities, but substantially reduces the cost of quality failures and reworked or rejected product. In any good quality system both quality control and quality assurance processes are used together.

The cost of poor quality is often difficult to calculate; however, the cost to an organisation will include both internal costs (i.e. the cost of problems found by the project or organisation) and external costs (i.e. the cost of problems found by the customer or a statutory authority).

Quality management tools and techniques

The tools and techniques that are used within project quality management can be used to identify quality issues across all three areas, i.e. planning quality, perform quality assurance and perform quality control.

Statistical sampling involves selecting a set number of sample items from an overall batch of items in order to determine the quality of the entire batch. Statistical process control techniques are fundamental to management and can be used in many situations. Within a project, they can be used whenever a project is doing a step multiple times.

The term 'mean' is the arithmetic average of the quantity we are trying to measure. Standard deviation describes the amount of variation around the mean or average. Returning to statistical process control, the recognition of variation being a normal characteristic of a process is important as it allows us to identify when a process is producing results that are not normal. For a process that is in control, then 99.8% of all measurements should be within the Lower Control Limit (LCL) and Upper Control Limit (UCL).

Cause-and-effect diagrams are also known as root cause, Ishikawa or fishbone diagrams. They display the reasons (causes) for the occurrence of a particular outcome (effect).

Many different graphs can be used to display data, and different graphs are good for creating different visual emphasis. The choice of the graph type should complement the emphasis that the author is trying to make. Histograms help make the relative differences between numbers apparent. A Pareto chart is simply an ordered histogram showing data ranked from highest to lowest.

Flowcharts are commonly used to explain processes and at times to also identify where a failure has occurred within the process. Flowcharts help people visualise a process, and ensure logical correctness. A variance on the flowchart is the swim-lane or cross-functional diagram. A swim-lane diagram is simply a flowchart with rows denoting each role.

Benchmarking involves comparing current organisational practices and metrics to other organisational practices and metrics. It allows organisations to identify differences in their approach or metrics to that of other organisations and to then determine if a change is necessary.

While not explicit in PMBOK Guide's list of tools and techniques, the following tools and techniques are sometimes used...

* Product or process testing involves taking the outputs and measuring whether they comply to specifications. To identify which items have passed, and when they were tested requires each output item to be uniquely identified. This unique identification (UID) may be the item's configuration number or it will correspond uniquely to that configuration number.

* Audits are simply formal checks to ensure that activities have been completed, and that there is evidence to support this.

* Verification and validation are the two most important design-related activities. Verfication involves presenting the completed requirements back to project stakeholders for review and approval. Verification can occur at many points in a project, and it is the most valuable tool for a project manager to understand. In building parlance, a project manager should always 'measure twice—cut once'. Validation is the process of ensuring that the delivered products meet the intended requirements and is generally performed by the customer. Validation is ensuring that the customer is happy that the right product has been (or is being) built.

The difference between these two processes is often explained as verification determines
whether the team are building the product right, and validation determines whether the team
built the right product.

Document deliverables are similar to any other deliverable. For documents that should be completed in accordance with a standard, it is handy to attach a compliance matrix at the end of the document showing how the document achieves that compliance.

A review is a process whereby a series of knowledgeable people check that work has been done correctly. To do this, the reviewers check that the inputs have been taken into account, that the
process has been followed, and that all steps have been performed as they were intended. Post-review meetings are held to discuss review findings.

Configuration means the functional, physical and interface characteristics of any hardware, firmware, software, etc. A project's design documents define the characteristics to be built into the final deliverables or products of a project. This configuration is the baseline for the project that the team works toward delivering. The configuration management system is a subset of the project management system. It is the formally documented system for controlling and disseminating configuration information within the project team. Projects often undertake two audits prior to completion. These audits are the physical configuration audit and the functional configuration audit.

Project quality management artefacts

Any organisation exists within a framework of government and statutory rules. The enterprise environmental factors (EEF) can be thought of as those rules that the organisation, project and resulting products must obey.

Every organisation has a different collection of quality policies, processes and procedures that define how it works, and different levels of information sharing. These are organisational process assets.

The other inputs to project quality management activities will include:
* quality metrics (which is a quality management output)
* quality control measures (which is a quality management output)
* quality checklists (which is a quality management output)
* the scope baseline
* the cost performance baseline
* the stakeholder register (see Topic 7—Project communications management)
* the risk register (see Topic 8—Project risk management)
* deliverables (see Topic 8—Project risk management)
* project management plan (see Topic 10—Project integration management)
* approved change requests (see Topic 10—Project integration management)
* work performance information (see Topic 10—Project integration management).

The outputs of the project quality management activities include:
* the quality management plan
* quality metrics
* quality checklists
* quality control measurements
* process improvement plans
* organisational process asset updates
* change requests
* project management plan updates
* project document updates
* validated changes
* validated deliverables.

Project quality management process

As we said at the start of the topic, the process for project quality management comprises of:
* plan quality
* perform quality assurance
* perform quality control.

To plan how the project will achieve the requirements for quality, a project manager must first understand what the total requirements are and then form a strategy as to how these requirements will be achieved. Once a strategy has been created the activities, artefacts, and dependencies can be created. Activities

Quality assurance is the process of checking and auditing the process and outcomes from quality control. Quality assurance audits the quality requirements, quality plans, processes,
metrics and measurements. Quality assurance is normally undertaken by an external group.

Quality control is the process of monitoring, recording, assessing and improving the quality activities. Quality control activities may be performed by the project manager, a project quality manager, the project office, or an external quality department.