Project Quality Management - Plan Quality Management

This process identifies quality requirements and/or standards for the project and its deliverables, and documents how the project will demonstrate compliance with relevant quality requirements and/or standards. This will help you manage and validate quality throughout the project.

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

1) Project Management Plan

• This plan helps develop the quality management plan and the information includes can be:
• Scope baseline
• Project scope statement
• project descriptions
• major deliverables
• acceptance criteria
• technical issues and concerns (from project scope management)
• definition of acceptance
• Work breakdown structure (WBS) 
• identifies the deliverables and work packages to measure against
• WBS dictionary 
• information about WBS elements
• Schedule baseline
• documents the accepted schedule performance measures with dates
• Cost baseline
• accepted time interval used to measure cost performance
• Other management plans
• plans that relate to project quality

2) Stakeholder Register

• Identifies the stakeholders that will have an impact on quality

3) Risk Register

• Contains information on threats and opportunities

4) Requirements Documentation

• Contains information on how the requirements shall meet stakeholder expectations to help plan how quality control will be implemented

5) Enterprise Environmental Factors

• May include:
• Governmental agency regulations
• Rules, standards and guidelines specific to an application area
• Working or operating conditions of the project or its deliverables 
• Cultural perceptions that may influence expectations about quality

6) Organizational Process Assets

• May include:
• Policies, procedures and guidelines (Organizations quality policy) 
• Historical databases
• Lessons learned from previous projects

7) Cost-Benefit Analysis

• Compares the cost of the quality step to the expected benefit.
• Benefits include:
• less rework
• higher productivity
• lower cost
• incrusted stakeholder satisfaction
• increased profitability

8) Cost of Quality (COQ) 

• Includes all costs incurred over the life of the product by investment in preventing nonconformance to requirements, appraising the product or service for conformance to requirements, and failing to meet requirements (rework). 
• Failure costs are found by the project or customer and are also called cost of poor quality. 
• Things to spend money on to avoid failures:
• Training
• Document processes
• Equipment
• Time to do it right
• Testing
• Destructive testing loss
• Inspections
• Things to spend money on because of failures 
• Rework
• Scrap
• Liabilities
• Warranty work
• Lost business

9) Seven Basic Quality Tools  (7QC Tools) 

• Cause-and-effect diagrams
• Also called fishbone or Ishikawa diagrams
• Used for root cause analysis
• Identifies the root of the problem and not the symptoms
• Click here for sample
• Flowcharts
• Also called process maps
• Displays the sequence of steps and the branching possibilities that exist for a process that transforms one or more inputs into one or more outputs. 
• They show activities, decision points, branching loops, parallel paths, and overall order of processing by mapping the operational details
• Click here for an example
• Checksheets
• Also called tally sheets
• They organize facts so that you can be more effective with collecting data about the potential quality problems
• Pareto diagrams
• Contains both bars (individual values in descending order) and a line graph (cumulative total) 
• It's organized into categories that measure either frequencies or consequences
• Click here for an example
• Histogram
• Describes the central tendency, dispersion, and shape of a statistical distribution
• Click here for an example
• Control charts
• Also knowns as Shewhart charts or process behavior charts
• used to determine if a process is stable or has a predictable performance
• Think of blood pressure or heart beat charts. They are monitored and plotted. You will see if it there are averages, above or below averages over a period of time. 
• Chart has upper and lower control limits to help identify standards and are usually set +/- 3 for repetitive processes. 
• Click here for an example
• Scatter diagrams
• Also known as plot ordered pairs (X,Y) or correlation charts
• If correlation can be established, a regression line can be calculated and used to estimate how a change to the independent variable will influence the value of the dependent variable. 
• Click here for an example 

10) Benchmarking

• Comparing actual or planned project practices to those of comparable projects to identify best practices and provide basis for measuring performance

11) Design of Experiments (DOE) 

• Statistical method for identifying which factors may influence specific variables of a product or process under development or production. 
• Applies principles and techniques at the data collection stage to ensure that you get valid, defensible and supportive conclusions
• Optimizes products and processes 

12) Statistical Sampling

• Involves choosing part of a population of interest for inspections
• Size of the sample is determined during the Plan Quality Management process so cost of quality includes the number of tests, expected scrap etc. 

13) Additional Quality Planning Tools

• May include:
• Brainstorming
• Force field test - diagrams of the forces for and against change
• Nominal group techniques - allows ideas to be brainstormed in small groups and then reviewed by a larger group
• Quality management and control tools - linked to the sequence of activities identified

14) Meetings

• Project teams meet to develop the quality management plan

15) Quality Management Plan

• Describes how the organization's quality policies will be implemented and describes how the team plans to meet the quality requirements for the project

16) Process Improvement Plan

• Details the steps for analyzing project management and product development processes to identify activities that enhance their value.
• Process boundaries - 
• purpose of process
• stand and end 
• inputs and outputs
• process owner
• stakeholders of the process
• Process configuration
• graphic depiction of processes
• Process metrics 
• Targets for improved performance

17) Quality Metrics

• Describes a project or product attribute and how the control quality process will measure it. 
• Example is that if the quality objective is to stay +/- 10% of the budget then specific quality metrics are used  to measure cost of every deliverable

18) Quality Checklists

• A structured tool used to verify that a set of required steps has been performed. 

19) Project Document Updates

• May include:
• Stakeholder register
• Responsibility assignment matrix
• WBS and WBS Dictionary

Source: PMBOK 5th ed.