Project Quality Management - Overview

This Knowledge Area includes processes and activities that determine quality policies, objectives, and responsibilities so that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken. Basically it works to ensure the project requirements are met and validated.

We will review the three process groups in this Knowledge Area that includes:

1. Plan Quality Management - identifies quality requirements and/or standard for the project and its deliverables. It documents how the project will demonstrate compliance with quality requirements and/or standards
2. Perform Quality Management - audits the quality requirements and the results from quality control measurements to ensure that appropriate quality standards and operational definitions are used
3. Control Quality - process of monitoring and recording results of executing the quality activities to assess performance and recommend necessary changes

Project Quality Management 

• Addresses the management of the project and the deliverables
• Quality measures and techniques are specific to the type of deliverable 
• Failure to meet quality requirements decrease profits, increase risk, errors and rework ($$$$) 
• Quality and grade are different
• Quality - delivered performance or result is "the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfill requirements" (ISO 9000) [10]
• Grade - design intent is a category assigned to deliverables having the same functional use but different technical characteristics
• Quality level that fails to meet quality requirements is always a problem but a low grade of quality may not
• Low grade software (one with a limited number of features) is of high quality (no obvious defects, readable manual) - acceptable for use
• High grade software (one with numerous features) is of low quality (many defects, poorly organized user documentation) - not acceptable for use/ineffective
• Precision = measure of exactness
• Think of a dart board. If there were no numbers on it the level of precision of where the dart lands is not as exact. 
• International Organization for Standardization (ISO) - by being compatible with the standards in place by ISO you will have consistency of quality across projects and across the world. 
• check out their website ISO website
• use this website to see how ISO are used in the real world
• The modern quality management approaches minimize variation and deliver results that meet the defined requirements and they recognize the following as important:
• Customer satisfaction
• Prevention over inspection
• Continuos improvement
• Plan-do-check-act (PDCA) -basis for quality improvement
• Other quality improvement models
• Total Quality Management (TQM) 
• Six Sigma
• Lean Six Sigma
• Malcom Baldrige
• Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3)
• Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) 
• Management responsibility
• Cost of quality (COQ) 
• Refers to the total cost of the conformance work and the nonconformance work that should be done as a compensatory effort because on the first attempt to perform that work, the potential exists that some portion of the required work effort may be done or has been done incorrectly. ($$$$$)
• Product returns
• Warranty claims
• Recall campaigns

Source: PMBOK 5th ed.