PMI Knowledge Areas

Project Quality Management

 What Is Project Quality?

The International Organization for

Standardization (ISO) defines
quality as “the degree to which a
set of inherent characteristics
fulfils requirements”
(ISO9000:2000)

Who ultimately decides if quality is acceptable?

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The Cost of Quality
 Thecost of quality is the cost of
conformance plus the cost of
nonconformance
The cost of conformance is the cost of
making sure products meet requirements,
and
the cost of non-conformance is the cost of
fixing defects or reworking.

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Cost of quality …
Cost Categories Related to Quality

 Prevention costs are the costs of planning, training, designing, and

implementing quality activities to avoid defects.
 Appraisal costs are the costs of inspecting, testing, auditing, and
measuring quality to identify defects
 Internal failure costs are costs associated with defects found before
the customer receives the product or service.
 External failure costs are costs associated with defects found after
the customer receives the product or service.
 Examples include processing customer complaints, customer
returns, warranty claims, and product recalls.
 Measurement and test equipment costs
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 What Is Project Quality Management?
 Projectquality management ensures that
the project will satisfy the needs for which it
was undertaken
 Qualitymanagement is not an event - it is a
process, a consistently high quality product
or service cannot be produced by a defective
process.
 Qualitymanagement is a repetitive cycle of
measuring quality, updating processes,
measuring, updating processes until the
desired quality is achieved. 5
Quality Management Processes

It includes:
1) Planning quality management
(Planning)
2) Performing quality assurance
(Executing)
3) Performing quality control
(Control/Monitor)
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Project Quality Management Summary

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1) Planning Quality
 Quality planning involves developing a quality plan and a quality
checklist (or standards) that will be used during the project
implementation phase.
 This checklist will ensure the project team and other actors are
delivering the project outputs according to the quality
requirements.
 The quality plan also describes the conditions that the services and
materials must possess to satisfy customer needs
 The quality plan also includes the procedure to ensure that the
quality standards are being followed by all project staff.
 The plan also includes the steps required to monitor and control
quality and the approval process to make changes to the quality
standards and the quality plan.
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Quality and IT Projects
Customers have difficulty
explaining exactly what they want
in an IT project.
What are the important scope
aspects of IT projects that impact
quality?

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Who’s Responsible for the Quality
of Projects?

 Project managers are ultimately responsible

for quality management on their projects
 Several organizations and references can help
project managers and their teams understand
quality
 InternationalOrganization for Standardization
(www.iso.org)
 IEEE (www.ieee.org)
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Project Quality Assurance
 Quality Assurance is a process to provide confirmation
based on evidence that the project meets the needs,
expectations, and other requirements of customers.
 Quality assurance occurs during the implementation phase
of the project
 Undertakes evaluation of the overall performance of the
project to achieve project standards
 Quality assurance is done not only to the products and
services but also to the process and procedures
 The goal is to reduce the delivery of poor-quality products
or services at the end of the project.

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2) Performing Quality Assurance
 Performing Quality Assurance through:
 Benchmarking
 Quality audits

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Project benchmarking
 Benchmarking projects involves comparing project processes and
performance metrics to either industry best standards and practices or
successfully completed projects.
 Comparison may be done in relation to other companies,
 Benchmarking is a useful project management tool for helping project
organizations select, plan, and deliver projects.
 Benchmarking best practices could mean making current or upcoming
projects better in terms of making them:
• More efficient (run on schedule or ahead of schedule)
• More cost-effective (keeping on-budget or under budget)
• More customer-centric or more customer service oriented
• And/or more profitable overall

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Quality Audits
 Quality audits are structured reviews of the quality management
activities that help identify lessons learned that can improve the
performance of current or future project activities.
 Audits are performed by project staff or consultants with
expertise in specific areas
 It reviews how the project is using its internal processes to
produce the products and services
 Its goal is to find ways to improve the tools, techniques, and
processes that create the products and services.
 Part of the audit may include a review of the project staff skills,
expertise, and knowledge

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Testing

 Many IT
professionals think
of testing as a stage
that comes near the
end of IT product
development

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Types of Tests
 Unit testing
 Integration testing
 System testing
 User acceptance testing

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Program inspections

These are peer reviews where

engineers examine the source of a
system with the aim of discovering
anomalies and defects.
Inspections do not require
execution of a system so may be
used before implementation.
Inspection checklists

Checklist of common errors should

be used to
drive the inspection.

Examples: Initialisation, Constant

naming, loop
termination, array bounds, etc.
An inspection checklist (a)

Fault class Inspection check

Data faults  Are all program variables initialized before their values are used?
 Have all constants been named?
 Should the upper bound of arrays be equal to the size of the
array or Size -1?
 If character strings are used, is a delimiter explicitly assigned?
 Is there any possibility of buffer overflow?
Control faults  For each conditional statement, is the condition correct?
 Is each loop certain to terminate?
 Are compound statements correctly bracketed?
 In case statements, are all possible cases accounted for?
 If a break is required after each case in case statements, has it
been included?
Input/output faults  Are all input variables used?
 Are all output variables assigned a value before they are output?
 Can unexpected inputs cause corruption?
An inspection checklist (b)

Fault class Inspection check

Interface faults  Do all function and method calls have the correct number
of parameters?
 Do formal and actual parameter types match?
 Are the parameters in the right order?
 If components access shared memory, do they have the
same model of the shared memory structure?
Storage management  If a linked structure is modified, have all links been
faults correctly reassigned?
 If dynamic storage is used, has space been allocated
correctly?
 Is space explicitly deallocated after it is no longer
required?
Exception management  Have all possible error conditions been taken into
faults account?
Quality control
 Quality control is the use of techniques and
activities that compare actual quality
performance with goals and
 define appropriate action in response to a
shortfall.
 The goal of quality control is to improve quality
and involves monitoring the project outputs to
meet stakeholder’s expectations.
 Quality control also includes how the project
performs in its efforts to manage scope, budget,
and schedule
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3) Controlling Quality
 The main outputs of quality control are:
 Acceptance decisions
 Rework
 Process adjustments
 Seven Basic Tools of Quality
 Flowchart
 Run Chart
 Scatter Diagram
 Histogram
 Pareto Diagram
 Control Chart
 Cause and Effect Diagram

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Flowcharts
 Flowchartsare graphic displays of the logic
and flow of processes that help you analyze
how problems occur and how processes can
be improved

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Run Charts
A run chart displays the history and
pattern of variation of a process over
time.

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Scatter diagram
A scatter diagram helps to show if
there is a relationship between two
variables

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Histograms
A histogram is a bar graph of a
distribution of variables

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Pareto Charts
A Pareto chart is a histogram that can
help you identify and prioritize problem
areas

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Quality Control Charts
A control chart is a graphic display of data
that illustrates the results of a process
over time
 The main use of control charts is to prevent
defects, rather than to detect or reject them

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The Seven Run Rule

 You can use quality control charts and

the seven run rule to look for patterns
in data
 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 non-
random problems
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Check sheet
used to collect and analyze data

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Cause-and-Effect Diagrams
 Cause-and-effect diagrams
 Theyhelp you find the root cause of a
problem
 aka fishbone or Ishikawa diagrams

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Six Sigma
 Six Sigma is “a comprehensive and flexible system for
achieving, sustaining, and maximizing business success.
 It is a philosophy and set of methods companies use
to eliminate defects in their products and processes
 All processes have variation
 Variation is the cause of all evil - it leads to defects and
customer dissatisfaction
 Seeks to reduce variation in the processes that lead to
product defects

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Basic Information on Six Sigma
 The target for perfection is the
achievement of no more than 3.4
defects per million opportunities
 The principles can apply to a wide
variety of processes
 Six Sigma projects normally follow a
five-phase improvement process called
DMAIC
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Six Sigma methodology
 Sigma uses DMAIC (Define - Measure - Analyze - Improve – Control)
1. In the Define phase, we need to have a good definition of what is the
problem, why we are wo
2. In the Measure phase, we make sure that data used for further analysis is
free of measurement errors. Six Sigma is about making decisions based on
facts and data. Data must be accurate
3. In the Analyse phase, we make a hypothesis and using data to either prove
or disprove our hypothesis. We make the hypothesis about what is causing
the problem and then establish the real root causes.
4. Improve phase focuses on getting the best possible solution to solve the
root cause of the problem. Deploy error free solutions in the real world.
5. Control, is all about ensuring that the solution is sustainable in the long
run.
 Deliver improved process to the process owner.
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Six Sigma and Statistics
 The term sigma means standard deviation
 Standard deviation measures how much
variation exists in a distribution of data

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Sigma and Defective Units

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Improving Information Technology
Project Quality
 Several suggestions for improving quality
for IT projects include:
 Establish leadership that promotes quality
 Understand the cost of quality
 Focus
on organizational influences and
workplace factors that affect quality
 Follow maturity models
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Maturity Models

 Maturitymodels are frameworks for

helping organizations improve their
processes and systems
 Software Quality Function Deployment
Model
 Capability Maturity Model Integration

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CMMI Levels
• Maturity Level 0 – Incomplete: At this stage work “may or may not get
completed.” Goals have not been established at this point and processes
are only partly formed or do not meet the organizational needs.
• Maturity Level 1 – Initial: Processes are viewed as unpredictable and
reactive. At this stage, “work gets completed but it’s often delayed and
over budget.” This is the worst stage a business can find itself in — an
unpredictable environment that increases risk and inefficiency.
• Maturity Level 2 – Managed: There’s a level of project management
achieved. Projects are “planned, performed, measured and controlled” at
this level, but there are still a lot of issues to address.
• Maturity Level 3 – Defined: At this stage, organizations are more
proactive than reactive. There’s a set of “organization-wide standards”
to “provide guidance across projects, programs and portfolios.”
Businesses understand their shortcomings, how to address them and
what the goal is for improvement.
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CMMI Levels …

• Maturity Level 4 – Quantitatively managed: This stage is more measured

and controlled. The organization is working off quantitative data to
determine predictable processes that align with stakeholder needs. The
business is ahead of risks, with more data-driven insight into process
deficiencies.
• Maturity Level 5 – Optimizing: Here, an organization’s processes are
stable and flexible. At this final stage, an organization will be in constant
state of improving and responding to changes or other opportunities. The
organization is stable, which allows for more “agility and innovation,” in
a predictable environment.

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Chapter Summary

 Project quality management ensures that the project will satisfy

the needs for which it was undertaken
 Main processes include:
 Plan quality

 Perform quality assurance

 Perform quality control

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