PLANNING STAGE (QUALITY) : PLAN QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Planning quality like another knowledge area to be considered when planning the project, consists of only one process which is Plan Quality Management. Plan Quality Management by definition is the process of identifying and documenting quality requirements (standards) for the project and its deliverables. This provides guidance on how quality will be managed and controlled in the project life cycle.

Below are few inputs to consider:

• Scope baseline – whereby through scope statement, description of the project, deliverables and acceptance criteria are clearly stated. It also provides the features of the product.
• Stakeholder register – whereby the interests and needs or requirements of the stakeholders involved in the project are also listed, this may also impact on quality matter.
• Risk register – whereby the risks mentioned may also impact the quality requirements.
• Requirements Documentation – whereby the project and product requirements as well as quality requirements are collected from the stakeholders in order to meet their expectations. This may help to control quality during the implementation.
• Enterprise Environmental Factors – whereby the supporting standands, guidelines or rules specifically for the quality management as well as working conditions for the project may affect project quality.
• Organizational Process Assets – if there is any organizational policies, procedures or guidelines for quality management, as well as lessons learnt from the prior similar projects regarding this process.

Plan Quality Management process can be done by the following tools and techniques:

• Meeting with the project team, project sponsor, selected stakeholders, project manager and anyone who is responsible for planning quality management, quality assurance or control.
• Brainstorming whereby the ideas from the project team members are generated regarding the quality management.
• Design of Experiments whereby the variables or parameters of the product or the process that can impact the quality are identified and therefore it helps to list the number and type of tests to run and the procedures to take on the product or the process.  
• Benchmarking whereby the practices (whether they are planned or actual) are compared with other projects to identify areas of improvements and therefore reduce more defects before execution starts.
• Seven Quality tools which are used within PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle to solve quality problems. These are:

o   Flowcharts whereby the activities, decision points, branching loops etc. are represented to transform one or more inputs to one or more outputs.

o   Checksheets or checklists whereby quality problems can be determined by checking which occur more frequently,

o   Control charts whereby the acceptable limits for the repetitive process are identified and controlled,

o   Histogram whereby from the checksheets, the data collected is analyzed by using distribution chart where the x-axis of the column is the category of the problem and y-axis of the column is the frequency of occurrence,

o   Cause and effect diagram (fishbone diagram or Ishikawa diagram or fishikawa diagram or herringbone diagram) whereby the causes of a problem or defect on the product or process are identified,

o   Scatter diagram whereby the correlation points are used to calculate regression line to estimate the change between independent and dependent variables,

o   Pareto diagram whereby from the histogram, the columns are arranged in decreasing order from the one with high frequency of occurrence in the left to the least, and a line that represents accumulative frequencies as a fraction of a total frequencies.

• Cost-Benefit Analysis whereby each activity is compared by performing analysis between cost of producing quality activity and the expected cost of benefit that will be gained from doing it. The cost of benefit can be less rework, high efficiency, more satisfaction, less manpower etc. This helps to know if the quality can be applied or not. It can be done by:

o   Finding sum of the costs of investment/production of quality and subtract it from the sum of costs of benefits. If the answer is positive then it is a better project

o   Using Future Value (FV) = Current Value (CV) {1+ Inflation Rate (R) /100}^ Period (n)

• Cost of Quality whereby the costs incurred during the project to avoid failure (conformance) and the costs incurred after the project because of failures (non-conformance) are calculated. The failure costs or in other words costs of poor quality can be found internally by the project or externally by the customers.

The output of this process is called Quality Management plan that describes how the quality requirements will be met and managed on the project. Also Quality checklists will be created to verify the steps in order to ensure the consistency in repetitive tasks. It will be also important to indicate the Quality Metrics that describe how quality will be controlled in terms of cost, defect frequency, failure rate, availability, reliability, test coverage and on-time performance. All of these will help the team to judge either the product or process is successful or failure in the project.

References:

PMI (2013). A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide 5^th Ed.) USA, Project Management Institute

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emak.quality.mnagement

https://pmstudycircle.com/2015/06/pareto-chart/

http://www.mypmps.net/en/mypmps/knowledgeareas/quality/quality-planning.html

https://opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement/chapter/chapter-14-quality-planning-project-management/

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-stunning-flowcharts-microsoft-word/

https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/17/check-sheets-in-accounting

http://blog.minitab.com/blog/real-world-quality-improvement/analyzing-a-process-before-and-after-improvement-historical-control-charts-with-stages

http://statisticalconcepts.blogspot.com/2010/03/pareto-analysis.html

http://www.emathzone.com/tutorials/basic-statistics/scatter-diagram.html

http://mathsubtopics.blogspot.com/2013/05/frequency-distribution-graph.html

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