Project Quality Management - Control Quality

This process monitors and records results of executing the quality activities to assess performance and recommend necessary change. It identifies the causes of poor process or product quality and recommends taking action. It also validates that project deliverables and work meet the requirements specified by key stakeholders necessary for final acceptance.

Quality assurance should be used to make sure stakeholder's requirements are met.
Quality control should be used to formally demonstrate that the sponsor or customer's acceptance has been met.

Terminology that you need to know:

• Prevention - Keeping errors out of the process
• Inspection - keeping errors out of the hands of customers
• Attribute sampling - result either confirms or does not conform
• Variables sampling - result rates on a continuos scale that measures the degree of conformity 
• Tolerances - specified range of acceptable results
• Control limits - identify the boundaries of common variation in a statistically stable process or process performance

Lets take a look at the Inputs, Tools and Techniques and Outputs of this process.

1) Project Management Plan

• Contains the quality management plan, which is used to control quality as it describes how quality control will be performed within the project.

2) Quality Metrics

• Describes a project or product attribute and how it will be measures.
• Function points - unit of measure to provide the amount of business functionality that a product provides a user
• Mean time between failure (MTBF) - predicted elapsed time between between inherent failures of a system during operation
• Mean time to repair (MTTR) - average time a device will take to recover from any failure

3) Quality Checklists

• Verify that the work of the project and its deliverables fulfill a set of requirements

4) Work Performance Data

• May include:
• Planned vs. actual technical performance
• Planned vs. actual schedule performance
• Planned vs. actual cost performance

5) Approved Change Requests

• May include modifications such as defect repairs, revised work methods, and revised schedule. 

6) Deliverables

• Any unique and verifiable product, results, or capability that results in a validated deliverable required by the project

7) Project Documents

• May include
• Agreements
• Quality audit reports - change logs
• Training plans and assessments
• Process documentation

8) Organizational Process Assets

• May include:
• Organization's quality standards and policies
• Standard work guidelines
• Issue and defect reporting procedures and communication policies

9) Seven Basic Quality Tools

• see my other blog post for the entire list. Click here. 

10) Statistical Sampling

• Samples are selected and tested as defined in the quality management plan

11) Inspection 

• Examination of a work product to determine if it confirms to a documented standards. 
• Also knows as reviews, peer reviews, audits, or walkthroughs. 

12) Approved Change Requests Review

• All approved change requests should be reviewed to verify that they were implemented as approved

13) Quality Control Measurements

• Documented results of control quality activities. 

14) Validated Changes

• Any changed or repaired items are inspected and will be either accepted or rejected before notification of the decision is provides. 

15) Verified Deliverables

• The goal of the Control Quality process is to determine the correctness of deliverables and the result are verified deliverables. They are an input to validate scope for formalized acceptance.

16) Work Performance Information

• Performance data collected from various controlling processes, analyzed in context and integrated based on relationships across areas. 

17) Change Requests

• Any changes are processed through the Perform Integrated Change Control process

18) Project Management Plan Updates

• May include:
• Quality Management Plan
• Process Improvement Plan

19) Project Documents Updates

• May include:
• Quality standards
• Agreements
• Quality audit reports and change logs
• Training plans and assessments
• Process documentation - info from using the seven basic quality tools or quality management and control tools

20) Organizational Process Assets Updates

• May include:
• Completed checklists
• Lessons learned documentation 

Source: PMBOK 5th ed.