1. What is quality?
Everyone talks about quality, but you first have to define what quality is in order to achieve it. Quality is the totality of an entity. So it’s all about the product, the entity, and the thing that your project is creating that bears the weight of its potential. So qualities are the attributes of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. So to satisfy them, of course, means that we meet them. And then we stated what our project scope statement would be. The fitness for use is then implied. So I want you to build me a house. Well, there are some implied needs there. I want a house that I could live in, that’s standing, and that’s safe. Well, the stated needs would be the exact requirements, the blueprints, the architect signing off on those blueprints, the inspections, and so on. That’s how we would achieve quality.
The project scope statement is the stated needs in a project. The implied need is the understanding of what the customer wants as a result of the project. It’s better to have all of your needs identified and documented. So quality must be defined upfront in order to achieve it. So this means that things like “good,” “fast,” or “reliable” are all subjective. It’s hard to achieve quality because those subjective terms don’t mean the same thing to all people. So when we talk about good or fast or reliable, then we need to nail those down and really define what good, fast, reliable, and so on are. We need goals to achieve. Quality versus grade is something that we need to have this conversation about because some people get hung up on that. A grade denotes high quality. And what I’m talking about here is in grade, so you might say, “Oh, we should have this fast of a processor, or we should have oak instead of plywood, or we should fly first class instead of coach.” Those are all items that are graded in project management. Grading doesn’t necessarily equate to quality. Using the right tools, the right equipment, the right resources, and the right facilities—that’s what’s of quality. You can have a quality product with a low grade. So, for example, you’re going to build a doghouse. Do you really need to use oak and burl, both very expensive resources, to have a quality dog house?
No. You could use plywood, some shingles, and a little bit of paint, and there you go. And you could still be of good quality if that’s what the customer asked for. So we need to understand the difference between quality and grade. Quality is about fulfilling requirements. So really understanding the project scope, the product scope, what we’re creating, and then those implied needs Now a grade is a category or a ranking. It’s like a class of services or a type of material. So if you think about any type of service, maybe you have a gold level, a silver level, and a bronze level. So those are your types of a ranking.Or, like I mentioned, coach versus first-class. If you’re going to fly somewhere, Now, low quality is always a problem. Low-grade may not be. So sometimes low-grade is just fine because it’s a temporary solution. So low grade and low quality are not the same thing. Quality requires accuracy and precision. Precision is a measure of exactness, and accuracy is an assessment of correctness. So precise measurements aren’t necessarily accurate measurements, and accurate measurements aren’t necessarily precise. Now, why is this important? Because when we do quality control, we’re going to be measuring. So we’re measuring accuracy.
When we’re doing the work, we want to be precise. It is the process of carrying out the objectives. Quality project management is about reaching customer satisfaction. It satisfies the requirements and is fit for use. Remember that quality has to be defined upfront. So this is prevention, the idea of quality being planned into a project, not inspected into it. Now, in a moment, we’ll talk about quality control. Quality control is inspection-driven, but you’re looking to keep mistakes out of the customer’s hands, where quality assurance is prevention-driven. So, for quality assurance, we want to plan into a project where quality is not being inspected. There is a management responsibility when it comes to quality. And that management must provide us with the tools we need to achieve the expected level of quality.
So, for example, if management said there should be no mistakes at all, well, that’s fine; we can do that, but we need enough time and the right resources in order to achieve that goal. Quality project management is also taking a look at dimming’s plan, do, check, and act. Dimming is kind of the grandfather of quality. He went to Japan after World War II and helped rebuild their society. And from that experience, he developed this approach to quality management. and that is to first plan the work. You do the work, you check the work for quality, and then you act on that result. As a result, the action requires you to either go back and plan and do the work again, or it allows you to move forward in the project. So this is “plan, do check, act,” sometimes called “PDCA.” Another approach that you should be familiar with is Kaizen technologies. Kaizen technology says that we have continuous, incremental improvements, and that helps us reduce costs and ensure consistency. Kaizen is a pretty neat philosophy because it’s also a way to achieve large goals, like running a marathon.
Well, with kaizen, maybe the first day if you’ve trained and you’ve never done this before, you just stand on the treadmill, and then the next day maybe you walk for 5 minutes and then the next day for 6 minutes, and maybe you jog for 3 minutes, and so on. So it takes very tiny increments to chip away at goals. Marginal analysis is the study of the cost of improvements in order to see how the costs contribute to an increase in revenue. So what we’re looking for here is an opportunity to cut costs or increase revenue. So we’re looking at all of the costs that go into a product and if we change any of those, how does it affect quality and also how does it affect revenue? So the marginal cost is simply how much more it would cost to produce one more unit. So it’s also just a way of saying, “Where can we cut costs to increase quality?” or “Where can we cut costs to not affect quality?”
2. What’s in the quality management plan?
In the quality management domain, one of your key processes is to plan project quality. The outcomes of project quality planning will result in two plans. the Quality Management Plan and the Process Improvement Plan. So in this lecture, we’re going to take a look at what it means to plan quality management and then what exactly is in these quality management plans and in the process improvement plan. So let’s hop in and first talk about quality management planning. The quality management plan really defines the quality policy for the project. In other words, what are the expectations for quality? Now, what are your enterprise environmental factors and organizational rules? They may already have a quality policy like Six Sigma, Lien, or what have you for your exam. Just be familiar with the fact that there is a quality policy, and that quality policy directly supports quality assurance requirements.
Now quality assurance is a prevention-driven activity. We are preventing mistakes with quality assurance. So quality assurance means we do the work correctly the first time. Now, the quality management plan also defines quality control. Quality control defines how quality control activities occur. Now quality control is an inspection-driven activity, and we do it in order to keep mistakes out of the customer’s hands. So quality control is inspection-driven. Quality assurance is prevention-driven. Let’s look at the inputs, tools, techniques, and outputs for planning quality management. Now the inputs here are the project management plan, the stakeholder register, risk register requirements, documentation, enterprise environmental factors, and organizational process assets. Cost-benefit analysis will be used to determine the tools and techniques you will use to plan quality management.
We look at the cost of quality and those seven basic quality tools: benchmarking the design of experiments, statistical sampling, additional quality planning tools, and meetings. The outputs of these processes we have quality management plan, process Improvement Plan, quality metrics, quality checklist, and project documents updates. Let’s talk about the quality management approach. The quality management approach is part of our quality assurance or quality policy. It’s really a top-down approach to quality where management leads and sets the direction and tone of expectations for quality in operations and in projects. Now we have to beware of overworking the project team because that affects quality. If we make team members work 50, 60, or 80 hours a week, obviously they’re going to get tired and aggravated, and that will affect quality. Now, we also have to be aware that we don’t speed through quality inspections even if we’re running late in the project work. If we have quality inspections scheduled or they are part of our plan, we have to take the time to do the inspection.
Of course, if you speed through a quality inspection, you’re going to miss mistakes, and then it’s just going to create more problems downstream. Those are the two things to watch out for. We have to not overwork the team, and we must not speed through quality inspections. Now, some quality planning tools are here. Brainstorming. You know about brainstorming to generate ideas. We have an affinity diagram. It’s a logical grouping of ideas. force field analysis. This is a new term that sounds like something from outer space, but force field analysis just means I plot out the forces for and against components of my project. So when you have competing objectives or you have stakeholders that are competing for a particular deliverable or a change, you just see who has the authority and who has the power as opposed to who does not. So it just shows forces for and against the nominal group technique. We call this small-group brainstorming. And then the ideas are reviewed by a larger group. And it’s typically done with an affinity diagram. You may also have some operational definitions. So it’s just a way of explaining,
okay, what terminology we’re using in this project, and some people call a hub, a switch, a router, and a patch panel all the same thing. And they’re not; those are four different things. So it really defines what the terminology is. You’ll be using metrics. So what are metrics that you use to measure? You’re going to measure by day, by hour, by units created per day, and by units created per month. Just what are the metrics you’re using for measurement? And then this may also be part of your lexicon or your glossary; it explains what a router, a switch, a hub, and a patch panel are. So those are operational definitions. And it’s also a good idea, if you have acronyms that are unique to your organization, to document those, because they may be well known to you and your project team, but some of your stakeholders may not know what you’re talking about. So it’s a good idea to include acronyms and things like that as part of the terminology in your project. The process improvement plan also comes out of quality planning, and it defines your process boundaries. in other words, like the workflow of what you should do.
It defines the process configuration for how a process should work. So, for example, one of our processes is communication. So in communications, we have to do communication planning and we have to do communication management or control. So we’d map out what it means to do communications planning. What does it mean to have control over communications, or to manage stakeholders? So the configuration would show how that process works. You may have processes that are unique to your organization, like order in/order out or your work authorization system. So the process configuration shows how it works. Process metrics will be how you measure the effectiveness of your processes. And then, from that measurement, it allows you to go in and set targets for improvement.
3. Seven basic quality tools
For your exam, you’ll need to be familiar with the seven basic quality tools. And these are tools that you can use with every projector; you can find your favorites and just use those. Let’s take a look at these tools and how you’ll use them in a project. Cause-and-effect diagrams, flowcharts, check sheets, paretodiagrams, histograms, control charts, and scatter diagrams are the seven tools provided. Let’s check out a cause-and-effect diagram. These are now known as ishikawa or fishbone diagrams. They’re all the same thing: a cause-and-effect diagram.
You begin with the effect. That’s the problem that you want to resolve. Usually it’s some defect or quality issue you’re having with the project. And then you and the team begin to identify, well, what are all the major causes that could contribute to this effect? Then, depending on how major those causes are, you may break them down again and say, “Well, are there contributing causes to the major causes that contribute to the effect?” So it helps you to find causal factors because if you can cure the causal factors, you will cure the effect or at least reduce the effect. So an example here could be that you have a piece of equipment that, when you are using it, let’s say it’s a printing press.
So you’re printing out brochures, flyers, and whatnot. And you notice that about 10 out of every 100 items that you print come out kind of blurry. And so that is the effect. Well, then you look at the causes. Well, what’s changed recently as we’re using a different kind of ink? Is the paper different? Has the machine been updated or done some maintenance on recently and then contributing causes? Well, we did change the ink, but we have not changed the paper or what have you. And so you just keep exploring—well, what could be all of the things that are contributing to this problem of about 10 out of every 100 things being blurry? So those are the effects and the major causes. It doesn’t solve the problem. It leads you to what may be causing the problem. And then you take those causes and address them, and then you see if the effect goes away or is reduced. So it’s kind of a way of narrowing down what may be contributing to the problem.
And you might identify that it’s a combination of things that are contributing to the problem. So that’s cause and effect, also known as an ishikawa or fish bone diagram. Now, flowcharting just shows the flow of a process. So in this example, it’s for an order fulfilment cycle. So a new marketing campaign results in new leads? Does it allow the salespeople to contact the leads? And as you can see, you can follow this arrow through all the different stops to get to a new sale or order fulfillment, so that’s all that a flowchart is. And then what this helps you do with quality is you can see where your flowchart doesn’t make sense or there’s a delay, a lag, or a breakdown in communication. It just helps identify what the process should be. It helps you to communicate what that process should be. And then it also lets you look at where there may be some problems in the flow of the process. A Pareto chart shows the total number of failures by category, from largest to smallest. Now, Pareto was an Italian macroeconomist, and what he noticed is that 80% of his harvest from his garden came from just 20% of the plants. It was actually his pea plants. And so what Peretto began to study was that in any environment, the majority of the results come from the minority of the population. So, for example, when we talk about failures, the majority of the failures result from the presence of minorities.
In other words, in this example, it’s called the 80/20 rule. In this example, the skills and the tractor, as well as the light, USB, interface, and miscellaneous, are where the majority of the failures occur, followed by the light, USB, and, soon, a scanner. So what a Pareto chart does is show, from largest to smallest, where the failures are in a system, a product, or even a project. The little line that you see curving across the top just represents the sum of the category to the left of each point. So if you notice we started with skills, there’s a little dot. And then, if we put skills and tractors together, the sum of those two goes up to about 350. And then if we add skills, tractors, and light, you can see the next dot is about 380, and so on. Now, with the perimeter chart, what this helps you do is say, “Okay, we’re going to put 80% of our effort on the two largest problems.” In this example, we’re going to really focus on improving skills and the tractor mechanism that is used in the scanner. And when those are solved or reduced to a lower point than the light or USB, then we’ll do another predo chart and show where the largest number of failures are and then attack those for your exam. All that you really need to know is how to recognise the characteristics of a Peretto chart. What you see here is a prototype. A predom chart is a special type of histogram because you’re going from the largest to the smallest, and it helps you attack the majority of the problems first.
I mentioned the histogram earlier. We talked about Paretos. A histogram is just a bar chart. That’s how it is. It’s a vertical bar chart that shows frequency. So in this quick example here, you can see we have the vendors, the management, and different teams. And then each one of those bars that you see represents a different factor. Like, maybe the first bar is the number of hours worked, and the second bar is the cost for those hours. The third bar represents accuracy. I just made that up. But all it is is a bar chart. So when you see a histogram, it’s nothing scary; it’s just a bar chart, and that’s all it is. Now a control chart is a way of identifying trends over time. So I’m going to walk you through a little scenario here with a control chart. Let’s say that we have a project to improve customer service at a call center. So in our control chart, we would say that first we need to know our requirements. Our requirements are that you either answer 1000 calls or answer 1000 calls flawlessly. And the worst you can do is answer 900 calls perfectly.
So we got about 100 calls in our window. Well, we know it’s probably unrealistic to answer 1000 out of 1000 calls perfectly. So we relax the upper requirement and say, okay, you have to answer at least 980 perfectly, which is our goal. And then other calls, instead of being around 900 for our lower requirement, we say, “Well, we’re going to come up to 920.” That’s our goal: to not dip below 920 and to not exceed 980. So out of 1000 calls, that’s our window: 980 to 920. Well, our mean is then the average of those two, so if we find the difference between 980 and 920, that would be 950, so I’m just going to call it 950. All right, so it’s about 30 either way. So, out of 1000 phone calls, we expect the average to be around 950. So for every 1000 calls that come into this call center, we plot out the result of how many we answered correctly. So if you notice, we have this line that goes up and down and up and down. Well, that represents each point in that line that goes up and down as 1000 calls. In this example, we would see that that’s 1000, and that’s 1000, and so on. So we would say that we answered 945 out of 950 on this first one. In the second batch of 1000, we answered 955.
And then we dipped down again to $945. And then something happened where we answered a whole bunch of calls up here. Out of 1000 calls, we answered 990 perfectly. And then we went back down. So what we’re seeing here are some trends. Now this call that’s up here, this batch of 1000 calls at the top where we went up to 980, is actually considered out of control because our control limit says that we only want to answer a maximum of 980 correctly. Now, it’s good. I mean, the results are good, but what we’re looking at is that there’s some reason why we exceeded that. Now, notice at the bottom that we have this section that’s highlighted or circled here at the bottom, and we went all the way down. Our lower mean, as we said, was 920. So, we had a batch of 1000 questions, and we only answered about 900 of them. And then we had another one where we only answered 890. So something happened down here.
Maybe there was a bug in the system, or we had some new people join; who knows? But those are also out of control. When you have something out of control, it’s also known as an “assignable cause.” That means you must investigate the circumstances surrounding the incident. So assignable cause means, well, there was something that caused that to go out of control. Now, it may be, like I said, that you have new employees, but it also could be on the top side, those two who were above 980, that, well, hey, maybe you’re getting better and better and you need to raise your control limit. So what happened there has a monetary cost. The next thing here is that whenever I have the results of seven measurements all on one side of the mean—seven in a row, all on one side of the mean—that is also an assignable cause. That is a trend, and it’s called the rule of seven. It’s not random that something happened. There’s a reason why the results of those 7,000 calls and offers of help were all on the same side of the mean. Positive or negative, that assignable cause may tell us, well, hey, maybe our mean is too high; it’s not realistic.
Or, if we’re getting better and better, if they’re improving, perhaps we should raise our mean. For your exam, you’re likely to see this chart or one like it and be asked to identify what it is. It’s a control chart. It shows trends over time. A scatter diagram is when we take two seemingly unrelated or related variables and see if, if I do an activity in one of those variables, does it have an effect on the other? The closer that these two activities come together, or intersect, when we plot out the results, then that shows us there is a relationship between activities. So, for example, you do some maintenance on a piece of equipment. Is your production average able to go up? And the longer you wait to do domain maintenance, does your production average go down? So it just shows the relationship between two variables and how they trim together. And that is a scatter plot.
4. What is quality assurance?
You may have rework, so you need to make a change request. project management plan Updates Project document updates and organizational So as to process assets Let’s take a look at what the quality management control tools are. Affinity diagrams, process decision programmer charts, interrelation diagram trees, prioritization matrices, activity network diagrams, and matrix diagrams for your exam—you really want to pay more attention to the seven quality tools than what we’re seeing here.
These are all ways to determine whether the project is of high quality or to make the best decision possible about achieving high quality in your project using quality management and control tools. So you’ll probably have one or two questions just to recognise that these are some quality management and control tools. You won’t need to know how to create any of these different diagrams on your exam. A quality audit, though, is where the project manager or an external organisation audits your project to see if you are complying with organisational policies. So are best practises being implemented? What’s not conforming? Do you have any shortcomings? Have you learned some new best practises or good practises to share with others? This organisation may help you improve processes about contributions. What’s worked and what hasn’t? And are you applying the lessons you’ve learned? So these are all questions that are answered as part of a quality audit.
5. What is quality control?
You already know that quality assurance is prevention-driven and that we don’t want mistakes to enter the project. Quality control is the inspection of work to ensure that there are no mistakes in the project. So quality control is an inspection to keep mistakes out of the customer’s hands. So you can see we have these three tiers here that are happening.
We have QA to ensure that we do the work correctly the first time. QC means that we inspect the work for quality, and if there are problems, we’re going to do rework. And then we have a third activity. Remember “scope validation,” where the customer inspects the work for quality? So QC means we never want mistakes to get to the point where customers see them. So quality control is inspecting the work to keep mistakes out of the customer’s hands. As you know, it’s an inspection-driven activity to keep mistakes away from the customer.
We also investigate why poor quality may have crept into our deliverables. So it’s a causal identification of poor quality. We want to validate quality for customer acceptance. ”’ scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope scope So the process of quality control now moves from QA to QC to scope validation.
Our inputs. Here are the project management plan, quality metrics, quality checklist, work performance data, any approved change request deliverables, project documents, organisational process assets, and some tools and techniques. Remember the seven basic quality tools: statistical sampling, inspection and approved change request review outputs, quality control measurements, validated changes, validated deliverables work performance information, change requests, project management plan updates, project document updates, and organisational process assets updates. All right, let’s look at how you actually do quality control. There are four steps here. Inspect the project and deliverables.
That is, your primary way to do quality control is to do an inspection and measure the work. So you’re doing some performance measurement here. You want to see how accurate and precise the results are and how well the project is performing based on the work that’s been done. Utilize those seven basic-quality tools. And then you may also try statistical sampling. So the idea of statistical sampling would be out of 100 activities or 100 units that may come off of a manufacturing line. You say, “Okay, I’m going to pull three of them at random and see what the quality is.” Now, not every project, of course, allows that type of statistical sampling, but that’s just one approach to doing quality control. It’s still inspection for your exam. Know that quality control is inspection-driven. You’re inspecting the work without the customer.
6. Section wrap
You already know that quality assurance is prevention-driven and that we don’t want mistakes to enter the project. Quality control is the inspection of work to ensure that there are no mistakes in the project. So quality control is an inspection to keep mistakes out of the customer’s hands. So you can see we have these three tiers here that are happening.
We have QA to ensure that we do the work correctly the first time. QC means that we inspect the work for quality, and if there are problems, we’re going to do rework. And then we have a third activity. Remember “scope validation,” where the customer inspects the work for quality? So QC means we never want mistakes to get to the point where customers see them. So quality control is inspecting the work to keep mistakes out of the customer’s hands. As you know, it’s an inspection-driven activity to keep mistakes away from the customer. We also investigate why poor quality may have crept into our deliverables. So it’s a causal identification of poor quality. We want to validate quality for customer acceptance. That concludes the scope validation. So the process of quality control now moves from QA to QC to scope validation. Our inputs.
Here are the project management plan, quality metrics, quality checklist, work performance data, any approved change request deliverables, project documents, organisational process assets, and some tools and techniques. Remember the seven basic quality tools: statistical sampling, inspection and approved change request review outputs, quality control measurements, validated changes, validated deliverables work performance information, change requests, project management plan updates, project document updates, and organisational process assets updates. All right, let’s look at how you actually do quality control.
There are four steps here. Inspect the project and deliverables. That is, your primary way to do quality control is to do an inspection and measure the work. So you’re doing some performance measurement here. You want to see how accurate and precise the results are and how well the project is performing based on the work that’s been done. Utilize those seven basic-quality tools. And then you may also try statistical sampling. So the idea of statistical sampling would be out of 100 activities or 100 units that may come off of a manufacturing line. You say, “Okay, I’m going to pull three of them at random and see what the quality is.” Now, not every project, of course, allows that type of statistical sampling, but that’s just one approach to doing quality control. It’s still inspection for your exam. Know that quality control is inspection-driven. You’re inspecting the work without the customer.
