clamda-im – project management project management 4.project control a.time and resources control...

CLAMDA-IM – Project Management

Project Management

4. Project controla. Time and resources control

b. Quality control


Time and resources control

It’s more important to handle the unexpected

rather than predict the unpredictable

Clip Apollo13 701 – prj state


• When the project becomes operational (realization phase), you need to understand whether activities and events actually proceed as scheduled

• It is advisable to set up some check point (if you don’t already have milestones) to verify any possible variance of times, resources (and costs) and in case, to proceed with the plan’s partial review

• The completion control is as important as the planning and it requires a great amount of concentration by the Project Leader




We go from the “planning” to the realization and control phase – The Deming Cycle

Plan

Start

Completion Check

Variance Evaluation

Corrective actions

Forecast to end

Plan changes Approval

PLAN

DOACT

CHECK



Completion Measures

• According to the plan’s update frequency and to milestones, for each activity you will have information regarding:

• The actual start date

• The actual end date

• The percentage of completion

• As for complex projects where you decide to monitor some economics through the planning, you can also collect :

• Procurement and external services costs

• Paid hours

• Material consumption



Completion Measures

• In case of an activity’s delay - that is when, at the date of control, its completion is inferior to what was scheduled - you need to see whether the delay can be made up or not. You can find three situations:

• The resource responsible for the activity which is behind schedule can set up temporary measures to make up (overtime, temporary increase of resources, outsourcing)

• The delay cannot be made up but the activity has free float. Therefore it does not impact on the following activity start dates neither on the expected end date

• The delay cannot be made up and the activity has no float, or the float is not sufficient to contain the delay. In this case you will have to consider the impact on the following activity start dates and on the project’s end date.



Completion Measures

• In case of some critical activity’s delay, this will directly cause the delay of the following start dates and on the project’s end date

• You then need to activate not only recovery actions on the activity which is behind schedule, but also preventive actions on the following activities so as to limit the effect of the delay

• Therefore it is important, within the project’s control activity, to jointly consider :

• The percentage of completion vs scheduled

• Any existing float

• Activity sequence

• Resources used

• People in charge



Completion Measures

• The quality of the decision you take depends on the effectiveness of planning tools you use

• The Gantt Diagram is very useful for completion control

• The completed work is shown by a “completion bar” overlapping the “scheduled bar”

• With the help of the Gantt Diagram is also possible to simulate and evaluate different scenarios and solutions



Completion measures – ex 1

At the 12th of December:

• Activity A, 100% completed, has been completed within schedule

• Activity C, 100% completed, has been completed within schedule

• Activity D, 25% completed, is behind schedule of 1 day. Yet, the activity has a free float and is not critical, therefore the day of delay will not produce any consequence timewise.



Completion measures – ex 2

At the 12th of December:

• Activity A, 15% completed, is highly behind schedule (6 days). With the Gantt analysis, you can see that the activity is not critical. Activity E, immediately following, has a free float of 5 days. The total delay on Activity A is more than activity E float, therefore, in the absence of corrective measures, it will impact on the start and end dates of the latter, and also on the project’s end date (it will be 1 day late).



The project’s rescheduling

• Time and resources control allows to identify any variance with the original plan

• You then proceed considering time and resources needed for the activity’s review, verifying whether the original targets can be maintained or not

• With the planning you can see the variation’s impacts on the baseline project and make simulations in order to find the most satisfying solution to achieve the goals

• Once the optimal alternative has been chosen, the correction and reviewing are made closing then the control cycle


Project Management

4. Project controla. Time and resources control

b. Quality control


QFD – Quality Function Deployment

The House of Quality



How to get a successful product/project

• Actions Involvement of the customer in the definition of value

Correct positioning of the product

Writing down the translation of expressed needs or marketing ideas through specific techniques

Involvement of the customer also during the development process

Definition of precise responsibilities on the product during its whole life cycle

• Techniques Quality Function Deployment (QFD)



• A project of product development must respect the time to market; have functionalities demanded by the market; but in order to be successful it has to account QUALITY

• Quality is the degree to which a product or a service fulfills customer requirements

• We can express customer requirements through functions he thinks the product/service will fulfill:• Fa functions expected by the customer• Fr functions realized by the manufacturer• Fp functions perceived by the customer



Customer Customer expectationsexpectations

Customer Customer PerceptionPerception

Realized Realized RequirementsRequirements

Missing or non-satisfyingfunctions Fr / Fa < 1

Wasted qualityFr / Fa > 1

Acknowledged quality

Fp / Fa > 1

Customer satisfactionFp / Fa = 1

Non-perceived Quality

Fr / Fa = 1Fp / Fa < 1

Quality that increases the perception of value

Fr / Fa = 1Fp / Fa > 1

Customer satisfactionFr / Fa = 1Fp / Fa = 1

Product’s functions• Fa functions expected by the

customer• Fr functions realized by the

manufacturer• Fp functions perceived by

the customer



Customer satisfaction ++

--

Excellent performance ++

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THRESHOLD/ BASIC (Must haves):

The absence or the lack of these product’s features causes a quick and drastic fall of customer satisfaction

LINEAR (One to one):

The improvement of these characteristics only creates a linear increase of customer satisfaction (ratio 1:1).

You don’t have any amazing improvements in customer satisfaction

Quality “Exciters” (Delighters) :

The adding of these features causes a quick and non-linear increase of customer satisfaction.

Adding these characteristics during the design phase can guarantee great sale results

Kano Diagramm



Kano QuestionnaireWhile you build up the questionnaire you ask two questions for each request of the customer.

The first question is relevant to a situation when the request is satisfied :

“If [the product] met [the request X], how would you feel?” This is a ‘functional question’. Ex :

The second question will refer to the case when it does not satisfy the request. This is the ‘dysfunctional question’, and can be as follows:

“If [the product] did not meet [the request X], how would you feel?”. Ex:

1a. If the laptop carried on working after having spilled Coke over the keyboard, how would you feel?(functional)

1. I like it

2. It must be so

3. Indifferent

4. I can live with it

5. I don’t like it

1.b. If the laptop stopped working after having spilled Coke over the keyboard, how would you feel?(dysfunctional)

1. I like it

2. It must be so

3. Indifferent

4. I can live with it

5. I don’t like it



• It is a method that concentrates on aspects that pursue customer satisfaction (Fr / Fa 1 and Fp / Fa 1) in order to define the quality that will have to be assured, starting from he first phase of the engineering process

• The QFD forces you to link the product’s characteristics to the customer requirements (VoC: voice of the Customer) in a systematic way, and calls for different profiles within the company to interact among themselves



The voice of the customer

Statements which reflect the customer’s perception of:

-A product/service feature

- an experience with a product/service

-an experience with a process or a person

The customer problems

Worries, values or expectations relevant to a product/service. It describes the main problems that a customer might have. It describes the experiences relevant to the product/service attributes expected or wanted by the customer

Critical features for the customer

Specific, precise and measurable expectations that the customer holds about a product/service

The voice of the Customer



How to build the House of Quality – Voice of the customer

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• Detection of Customer’s needs (aim) [Rif. ]• Who is the customer (final user, dealer,

internal customer, ..) ?

• What are his expressed or hidden needs?

• Analysis of the customer language and possible translation into an internal and agreed language, taking into consideration the different meaning that different subjects could give to terms

• Rationalization of customer needs into similar categories

• Deployment of primary needs up to elementary needs according to a branched structure



• Detection of engineering characteristics [Rif. ]• Starting from customer elementary needs,

detect the correspondent design characteristics

• The engineering characteristics (EC) must be measurable and representable with precision. The language is the one used by the engineers (Voice of the Engineer - VoE )

• You should detect at least one EC for each elementary need of the customer – verify the squaring

• The EC should directly influence the quality perceived by the customers.



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WhatWhat the customer

wants

RelevanceRelevance

Importance Importance for the customer

HowHow

RelationshipRelationship

CorrelationCorrelation(optional)(optional)

high (5)

medium (3)

low (2)



• Define the relationship between the expected quality and the engineering characteristics – Relationship Matrix [Rif. ]• The work team must establish whether there

is any relationship between EC and Elementary Needs and the intensity of these relationships

• The satisfaction degree as for the j-th need is (EC1, EC2, ..., Eci, ..., ECm)

• Define the degree of importance of elementary needs, by defining a hierarchy based on the customer preference system

• You might have to find some compromise solution to be able to satisfy, at least partially, conflicting elementary needs. It is essential that the voice of the customer prevails over the voice of the engineer.

HoQ



• Benchmarking of the perceived quality [Rif. ] and of the planned quality [Rif. ]• Competitors analysis (perceived quality) can be

made through a representative sample of customers

• For each elementary need you analyze the customer satisfaction degree as for our product currently in use (within the same segment of the market of the one we are designing) and as for the use of competing products

• You can use the same scale used for elementary needs (ex. from 1 to 5, from 1 to 10, ..)

• Our own product could be evaluated based on claims and on the number of interventions under warranty

• As for the planned quality, you need to compare each EC with a reference value of competitors

• The perceived and delivered quality analysis compared to the reference competitors allows to re-adjust target figures



• Correlation Matrix [Rif. ]• It’s a triangular grid (the roof of the

HoQ) created to highlight the relationships among EC and their “intensity”

• It is to identify which EC are in conflict among themselves (i.e. when a project action pursues a certain EC value but penalizes another target) and which meet

• It is to verify / plan / optimize the project’s actions to undertake and any compromise needed



• Engineering characteristics hierarchy [Rif. ]• Combining the elementary needs hierarchy

(pi) with the content of the Relationship Matrix, we want to obtain an Engineering characteristics hierarchy

• The scale that defines the weight of the relationship (Ri,j) is put into a cardinal scale 1-3-9

• The absolute technical importance level IT of each engineering characteristic is given by :

• You can find the relative importance IT* dividing ITj for the summation of all values IT. This value shows the importance that the customer gives to each EC

IT p Rj ii

n

i j

1,



• The use of the QFD must leave aside, at least at the beginning, economical considerations on the product (concepts of cost and value )

• You need to look for opportunities where there is a high interest from the customer and low results from competitors

• Negative correlations between EC should be eliminated or, at least, reduced

• The success highly depends on the capability of involving a team making the members work together



QFD benefits

• Quality improvement

• Reduction of engineering and production costs

• Higher product reliability

• Reduction of decision and planning time

• Reduction of claims under warranty

• Better marketing opportunities

• Work force more customer-oriented



The QFD extension

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PRODUCT COMPONENTS PROCESSES

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