Chapter 8

Project Quality Management

(ISO) defines quality as “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements” (ISO9000:2000). Project quality management ensures that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken. The processes in quality management are Quality planning, quality assurance and quality control.

As we know cost planning is the ability to anticipate situations and prepare actions to bring about the desired outcome. And, design of experiments is a quality planning technique that helps identify which variables have the most influence on the overall outcome of a process.

In quality management there are scopes in IT projects; functionality is the degree to which a system performs its intended function, features are the system’s special characteristics that appeal to users, system outputs are the screens and reports the system generates, performance addresses how well a product or service performs the customer’s intended use, reliability is the ability of a product or service to perform as expected under normal conditions and maintainability addresses the ease of performing maintenance on a product.

Secondly, quality assurance. It is includes all the activities related to satisfying the relevant quality standards for a project. Benchmarking generates ideas for quality improvements by comparing specific project practices or product characteristics to those of other projects or products within or outside the performing organization. Quality audit is a structured review of specific quality management activities that help identify lessons learned that could improve performance on current or future projects.

The main outputs of quality control are; acceptance decisions, rework and process adjustments. Thus, there are Seven Basic Tools of Quality that help in performing quality control:

1. Cause-and-effect diagrams trace complaints about quality problems back to the responsible production operations.
2. Control chart is a graphic display of data that illustrates the results of a process over time.
3. Run chart displays the history and pattern of variation of a process over time.
4. Scatter diagram helps to show if there is a relationship between two variables.
5. Histogram is a bar graph of a distribution of variables
6. Pareto chart is a histogram that can help you identify and prioritize problem areas
7. Flowcharts are graphic displays of the logic and flow of processes that help you analyze how problems occur and how processes can be improved.

Six Sigma is “a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving, sustaining, and maximizing business success. Six Sigma is uniquely driven by close understanding of customer needs, disciplined use of facts, data, and statistical analysis, and diligent attention to managing, improving, and reinventing business processes.” Six 9s of quality is a measure of quality control equal to 1 fault in 1 million opportunities. In the telecommunications industry, it means 99.9999 percent service availability or 30 seconds of down time a year.

In the testing for the project it must be done during almost every phase of the IT product development life cycle. There are 4 types of testing:
* Unit testing tests each individual component (often a program) to ensure it is as defect-free as possible
— Integration testing occurs between unit and system testing to test functionally grouped components
— System testing tests the entire system as one entity
— User acceptance testing is an independent test performed by end users prior to accepting the delivered system

Juran, Crosby, ishikawa are the quality experts in quality management. In U.S, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award will be given to companies achieved a level of world-class competition through quality management. And for the CMMI levels, from lowest to highest, are:
— Incomplete
— Performed
— Managed
— Defined
— Quantitatively Managed
— Optimizing