project quality management

IT/IS Project Management Project Quality Management

Patoliya Chiragkumar (ECU ID: 10164346)

IT/IS Project Management Theory Paper: Project Quality Management Submitted to:

Mr. Shankar Gokule Submitted by:

Chiragkumar Patoliya Course Code:

ITPM-MIS5604 ECU ID:

10164346 Due Date:

17th Oct-2009

2009



Table of Contents

Table of Contents _____________________________________________________________ 2

Introduction _________________________________________________________________ 3

Quality Characteristics ________________________________________________________ 4

Issues Related to Project Quality Management _____________________________________ 5

Approach to Related Issues _________________________________________________________ 5

Quality Management Framework ________________________________________________ 6

Quality Planning __________________________________________________________________ 7

Tools and technique ______________________________________________________________________ 8

Quality Assurance (QA) ____________________________________________________________ 9

Tools and technique ______________________________________________________________________ 9

Quality Control (QC) _________________________________________________________ 10

Tools and technique _____________________________________________________________________ 10

Conclusion _________________________________________________________________ 11

References _________________________________________________________________ 12



Introduction

Quality is defined as “the sum of attribute of a thing or entity that tolerate on its capacity to

satisfy direct or indirect needs.” Quality management is a procedure to make sure that all project

tasks or processes essential to plan, design and execute a project are valuable and capable with

respect to the justification of the performance and objective (Dale, 2006). Project quality

management is not divide and self-governing activities that happen at the end of an activity to

evaluate the degree of quality output (Barad & Raz, 2000). More than that it is not a valuable

material or service that you can purchase from market, the quality management is art of maturity

that you can develop within your organization with the maturity extract of experience and

knowledge (Murphy, 2008). Quality is not an additional feature to the product or service but it is

excellence of internal feeling of consumers’ satisfaction.

Project quality management is a permanent concept of objective that remains same when project

starts till end of project (Hides, 2000). Quality management concentration on enhancing

stakeholders’ ultimate satisfaction through continuous improvement to the project tasks and

processes by removing non value added activities. The interest in particular research area is to

develop the ultimate customer satisfaction model which covers all aspect of total quality

management (Steyn, 2008). It must be analyzed equally align with cost, time and scope. Goals of

quality program include:

1. Fitness for use

2. Fitness for purpose

3. Customer satisfaction

4. Conformance to the requirements



Quality Characteristics

There is an attachment of attribute with each product, process and service which defines or easy

to measure the nature of quality (Murphy, 2008). The characteristics define how project’s

processes or products and services are able to meet the requirement of the project which is fit for

use for process or product owner. Some of the key characteristics are listed below.

1. Functionality: Functionality is a level, by product or process performs its directed functions.

It is important that desired product behave as expected and shows it’s as of use.

2. Performance: It is how well product or process performs when it is required to perform.

3. Reliability: It is an ability to perform products’ or processes’ desired behavior under normal

conditions without failure. For example Material used for blood testing should be able to

present the information in a reliable and dependable manner that will help identify significant

diseases. The trust of the beneficiaries depend on the quality of the tests

4. Relevance: it’s the attribute of how a product or service meets the defined needs of the

beneficiaries or user; it should be related, appropriate, and fit to its proposed use or

application.

5. Timeliness: It is how the product or service is conveyed in time to deliver the desired

behavior when it’s required and not later; this is a critical quality attribute for healthcare and

retail project.

6. Suitability: It defines the robustness of its use, it aptness and correctness.

7. Completeness: degree of quality that the service is absolute and covers all the total scope of

feature of product or services.

8. Consistency: services or product’s attributes are delivered in the same way for every user

with respect to time and cost also.



Issues Related to Project Quality Management

Delivering IT projects and support to its clients’ business on time is a major issue for IT

enterprise. Business can be on risk and huge operational cost is hidden to clients’ business

without delivering quality to service or product (Steyn, 2008). IT project need to develop

maturity to adopt possible best practices to be effectual because quality does not comes free. All

processes are guided with appropriate practical matrices with understanding business model of

clients’ business objectives (Hides, 2000).

IT organizations are facing the challenges with the changing nature of clients’ business sue to

high degree of competitiveness. So the aspects of quality are being changed within industries

(Chao & Ishii, 2004). IT organization required to be highly dynamic in ability to adopt changes

of quality objectives otherwise organization continues with failure of project (Barad & Raz,

2000). Key dynamic changes in quality issues are listed below.

Applications are less secluded or independent today because organizations require high

degree of integration and need to have all application perform into one like ERP

application deployment.

There is high level of diversity in application in terms of platforms, languages and

vendors.

E-business focused business applications and fashion of 24x7 performance monitoring.

Development of quality is affected by the shift to web 2.0 technologies and service

oriented architecture (SOA).

Approach to Related Issues

Above listed issues can be a major risk for organization if they are not capable to manage it.

Here are some brief approaches listed to overcome such issues in IT project quality management.

Set up a transparent foundation, initiating with defining roles, processes and standards.

Comprise generating or adopting a typical set of training, not only for the testing team,

however also for developers.

Identify that agile techniques make a more quality-focused approach, but tasks aren't

well-defined external of core expansion.

Understand that outsourced maturity also hampers feasible development practices.



Quality Management Framework

Project quality management includes philosophies or approaches, techniques and processes to

make sure and advance quality. The viewpoints as well as the procedures are explains well in

journals. Methods to supervise project quality have however not established the similar

awareness and where practices are addressed, the stress is primarily on arithmetical process

control (Steyn, 2008). A framework of project quality management projected in figure 1. The

framework contains statistical procedure control practices but also integrate a mixture of other

methods that are frequently used by practitioners (Dale, 2006). The three major process of

quality management are quality planning, quality assurance and quality control which are plotted

major project area below in table 1.

Input Process Output

WBS

Scope

Policies

Plan-Quality Planning

Do-Quality Assurance

Check-Quality Control

Act-Quality Improvements

Quality Standards

Quality Plan

Lesson Learned

Table 1: Quality Approach in Project

More than that table 2 contains tools and techniques of project quality management which are

mentioned in PMBOK.

Quality Planning Quality Assurance (QA) Quality Control (QC)

Cost-benefit analysis

Benchmarking

Design of experiments

Cost of quality

Additional quality planning

tools

Quality planning tools and

techniques

Quality audits

Process analysis

Quality control tools and

techniques

Cause and effect diagram

Control charts

Flowcharting

Histogram

Pareto chart

Run chart

Scatter diagram

Statistical sampling

Inspection

Defect repair review

Table 2: project quality management tools and techniques



Figure 1: Project quality management framework

Quality Planning

Quality planning contains assessments concerning events necessary to meet quality necessities

and the designed quality actions frequently involve the use of definite QA and QC methods

(Steyn, 2008). The QA and QC methods therefore need to be determined throughout quality

planning in the case of projects to develop new systems.



Tools and technique

Define the outcome quality and prepare the checklist of it. Figure 2 shows the steps

involved in preparing product quality checklists.

Quality requirements and standards including benchmarking with respected to other

projects and prepare the project priority matrix shown in figure 3.

Processes needed in the on the whole project plan to meet the quality specifications and

principles, containing the tools and techniques that would be used in QC and QA.

Decision matrices to check whether standards are being match with specifications.

Judgment on how the entity of project under reflection could assist the continuous

improvement of project policies and processes to improve organization wide quality.

Figure 2: Product Quality Checklist Figure 3: Project Priority Matrix



Quality Assurance (QA)

QA is not only mandatory on each project to make sure fulfillment with requirements, another

part is continuous improvement in inter-project environment that is assisted by methodical

project close-out (Steyn, 2008). Therefore, in a project background, Continuous Improvement

(CI) is another inevitable part with QA. CI comes with the enterprise experience and wide

knowledge on quality aspects. When QA for project is determined with a defined project only,

CI advances the enterprise capability to handle projects and improves the maturity quality

management (Murphy, 2008).

Tools and technique

Quality Audits:

Quality audits are used to confirm the project management process and technical process with

respect to approved processes and specifications

Process Analysis

Process analysis ensures the current running processes perform well or not. Output of this

method will feed to the quality control techniques.

PCDA Cycle

PCDA stands for Plan Do Check Act cycle, generally used for continuous improvements

of quality aspects in terms of process, product or services of project as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4: PDCA Cycle



Quality Control (QC)

Two sides of project quality control are designed quality control and unplanned problem working

out. Formal QC tasks have procedures that can be considered to a relative level of detail before.

Casual difficulties are obviously creates surprising delays, and incident reserves in budgets and

schedules should make provision for activities to examine and resolve such problems (Hides,

2000).

Tools and technique

Route Cause Analysis

Route cause analysis contains the fundamental key drivers of changes which are responsible for

causes in project. Ishikawa diagram is used to define the route cause analysis shown in figure 5.

Figure 5: Ishikawa Diagram

Inspections

Inspections are repeatedly used as quality control technique through final approval; inspections

could shape fractions of audits and to make sure that precise mechanism fulfill requirements

prior to integration into the superior system.

FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis)

It is a practice to decide in what behavior a system might stop working as well as what the result

of the possible failures might be. FMEA provides inputs to classify characteristics.



Pareto Charts

According to Pareto’s definition, 20 percents of causes creates 80 percents of problems. That

carts is formed with histogram which explained the magnitude of problems, figure 6 explains the

Pareto charts.

Figure 6: Sample Pareto Chart

Conclusion

Going through all aspects and main processes of project quality management, it is clearly defines

that quality does not comes over night. Lots of practices and vast knowledge and experience

shape the fruitful enterprise quality bunch. Extracting this theory paper and journal articles cited,

it is sure that quality starts from enterprise wide program to smaller process which you cannot

separate from them.



References

Barad, M., & Raz, T. (2000). Contribution of quality management tools and practices to project

management performance. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management , 17 (4/5),

571-583.

Chao, L. P., & Ishii, K. (2004). Project quality function deployment. International Journal of

Quality & Reliability Management , 21 (9), 938-958.

Dale, B. (2006). Quality and risk management:what are the key issues? The TQM Magazine , 18

(1), 67-86.

Hides, M. (2000). Facilitating total quality through effective project management. International

Journal of Quality & Reliability Management , 18 (4), 407-422.

Murphy, T. E. (2008, 08 08). Key Issues for Software Quality and Testing, 2008. Gartner

Research , pp. 21-28.

Steyn, H. (2008). A Framework for Managing Quality on System Development Projects.

PICMET 2008 Proceedings (pp. 1295-1302). Cape Town: PICMET.

project quality management

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