Chapter 8. Quality management: Getting it right
It’s not enough to make sure you get it done on time and under budget. You need to be sure you make the right product to suit your stakeholders’ needs. Quality means making sure that you build what you said you would, and that you do it as efficiently as you can. That means trying not to make too many mistakes and always keeping your project working toward the goal of creating the right product!
What is quality?
Everybody “knows” what quality is. But the way the word is used in everyday life is a little different than how it is used in project management. You manage quality on your project by setting goals and taking measurements. That’s why you need to understand the quality levels your stakeholders believe are acceptable, and ensure that your project meets those targets…just like it needs to meet their budget and schedule goals.
You need more than just tests to figure out quality
A lot of people confuse quality with testing. When projects run into quality problems, some project managers will respond by adding more testers to the project to try to find more bugs. But testing is only one part of the story. To know your product’s quality, you need to do more than test it:
Once you know what the product is supposed to do, it’s easy to tell which tests pass and which fail
Testing is all about checking to be sure that the product does what it is supposed to do. That means that you need to have a good idea of what it is supposed to do to judge its quality. That’s why the most important concept in defining quality for the PMP exam is conformance to requirements. That just means that your product is only as good as the requirements you have written for it. To say that something is a high-quality product means that it fulfills the requirements your team agreed to when you started the work.
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That’s why getting the Collect Requirements process right is so important!
Quality is the measurement of how closely your product meets its requirements.
Quality up close
There are a few general ideas about quality that will help you understand a little better where the PMP exam is coming from. A lot of work has been done on quality engineering in the past 50 years or so that was originally focused on manufacturing. Those ideas have been applied to product quality over lots of different industries. Here are a few concepts that are important for the exam.
Customer satisfaction is about making sure that the people who are paying for the end product are happy with what they get. When the team gathers requirements for the specification, they try to write down all of the things that the customers want in the product so that you know how to make them happy.
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Customer needs should be written down as requirements before you start to build your product. That way, you can always plan on building the right thing.
Some requirements can be left unstated, too. Those are the ones that are implied by the customer’s explicit needs. In the end, if you fulfill all of your requirements, your customers should be really satisfied.
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Some requirements are just common sense—like a product that people hold can’t be made from toxic stuff that kills you. It might not be stated, but it’s definitely a requirement.
Fitness for use is about making sure that the product you build has the best design possible to fit the customer’s needs. Which would you choose: a product that’s beautifully designed, well constructed, solidly built, and all around pleasant to look at but does not do what you need, or a product that does what you want despite being really ugly to look at and a pain in the butt to work with?
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This idea came from a quality theorist named Joseph Juran.
You’ll always choose the product that fits your needs, even if it’s seriously limited. That’s why it’s important that the product both does what it is supposed to do and does it well.
Conformance to requirements is the core of both customer satisfaction and fitness for use. Above all, your product needs to do what you wrote down in your requirements specification. Your requirements should take into account both what will satisfy your customer and the best design possible for the job.
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Philip Crosby made this idea popular in the early 1980s. It’s been really important to quality engineering ever since.
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That means conforming to both stated and implied requirements.
In the end, your product’s quality is judged by whether you built what you said you would build.
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Quality is a measure of how well your product does what you intend.
It’s easy to mistake a low-grade product for a low-quality one.
When people talk about the quality of their car or their meal, they are often talking about its grade. You can judge something’s grade without knowing too much about its requirements. But that’s a lot different than knowing its quality.
Quality vs. grade
You can eat a lobster platter for dinner, or you can eat a hot dog. They are both types of food, right? But they have very different tastes, looks, feels, and most importantly, cost. If you order the lobster in a restaurant, you’ll be charged a lot more than if you order a hot dog. But that doesn’t mean the lobster is a higher-quality meal. If you’d ordered a salad and got lobster or a hot dog instead, you wouldn’t be satisfied.
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Quality means that something does what you needed it to do. Grade describes how much people value it.
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Higher-grade stuff typically costs more, but just because you pay more for something doesn’t mean it does what you need it to do.
“An ounce of prevention…”
It’s not enough to go to the dentist to get your cavities filled. You need to brush your teeth every day. The same goes with product quality. If you focus on preventing mistakes on your project before they happen, you are more likely to get the product done on time and without spending too much money.
When it comes to defects, prevention is always better than inspection!
We could hire a lot more inspectors to check to see if each of the products has a sticky button and send it for repair…
And that’s why you need the three Quality Management processes!
There are three processes in the Quality Management knowledge area, and they’re all designed to make sure that you and your team deliver the highest quality product that you can.
Plan Quality Management is like the other planning processes you’ve learned about—you create a Quality Management plan to help guide you and your team through quality activities.
Control Quality is the Monitoring and Controlling process where you look at each deliverable and inspect it for defects.
Manage Quality is where you take a step back and look at how well your project fits in with your company’s overall quality standards and guidelines.
Plan Quality is how you prevent defects
Since prevention is the best way to deal with defects, you need to do a lot of planning to make sure that your product is made with as few defects as possible. The Plan Quality Management process focuses on taking all of the information available to you at the beginning of your project and figuring out how you will measure your quality and prevent defects.
How to plan for quality
You need to plan out which activities you’re going to use to measure the quality of the product of your project. And you need to be sure that the activities you plan are going to pay off in the end. So you’ll need to think about the cost of all of the quality-related activities you want to do. Then you’ll need to set some guidelines for what you’re going to measure against. Finally, you’ll need to design the tests you’re going to run when the product is ready to be tested.
Data gathering
Benchmarking means using the results of Plan Quality on other projects to set goals for your own. You might find that the last project your company did had 20% fewer defects than the one before it. You would want to learn from a project like that, and put in practice any of the ideas the company used to make such a great improvement. Benchmarks can give you some reference points for judging your own project before you even get started with the work.
Brainstorming. We’ll learn more about this technique in Chapter 11. Teams use brainstorming to identify the best way to manage quality on the project.
Interviews. The people participating in the project have a lot of information from their experience that can help you plan quality management.
Data analysis
Cost-benefit analysis is looking at how much your quality activities will cost versus how much you will gain from doing them. The costs are easy to measure; the effort and resources it takes to do them are just like any other task on your schedule. Since quality activities don’t actually produce a product, though, it is harder for people to measure the benefits sometimes. The main benefits are less rework, higher productivity and efficiency, and more satisfaction from both the team and the customer.
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That makes sense. A team that is making a high-quality product will be really proud of their work.
Cost of quality is what you get when you add up the cost of all of the prevention and inspection activities you are going to do on your project. It doesn’t just include the testing. It includes any time spent writing standards, reviewing documents, meeting to analyze the root causes of defects, doing rework to fix the defects once the team finds them—absolutely everything you do to ensure quality on the project.
Expert judgment means going directly to the people with expertise and getting their help.
Decision Making
Multicriteria decision analysis let you analyze multiple issues and prioritize so that you can work on the most important ones first.
Test planning
This is where you apply the scientific method to create a set of tests for your project’s deliverables. It’s a statistical method, which means you use statistics to analyze the results of your experiments to determine how your deliverables best meet the requirements. A lot of quality managers use this technique to produce a list of tests that they’ll run on the deliverables, so they have data to analyze later.
Data Representation
Flowcharts give you a way to see all of the steps your team will follow when they perform Manage Quality activities on your project.
Matrix diagrams are tables, spreadsheets, or pivot tables that help you analyze complex relationships.
Logical data models give you a visual way to think about your data, which can help you see quality issues you didn’t see before.
Meetings
These are used to figure out how your team will do all of the quality-related activities your project requires. The whole team might collaborate on the Quality Management plan in these meetings.
The Quality Management plan gives you what you need to manage quality
Once you have your Quality Management plan, you know your guidelines for managing quality on your project. Your strategies for monitoring your project quality should be included in the plan, as well as the reasons for all of the steps you are taking. It’s important that everyone on the team understands the rationale behind the metrics being used to judge success or failure of the project.
The Quality Management plan is the main tool for preventing defects on your project.
Project management plan updates might need to be made because the Quality Management planning process identifies new risks or activities that add to the scope of the project. Those changes would be made in the Risk Management plan and the scope baseline.
Quality metrics are the kinds of measurements you’ll take throughout your project to figure out its quality. If you’re running a project to install windows in a skyscraper, and 15% of them have to be reinstalled because they were broken, that’s an important metric. You’ll probably want to work with your company to bring that number down.
Here’s where you document how you’ll be figuring out the product’s quality. You need to write down the formulas you’ll use, when you will do the measurements, why you are taking them, and how you will interpret them.
Project document updates might need to be made because you have found new information in the course of planning your quality activities that affects one of the other plans you’ve already made. That’s why this process includes an output for making those kinds of changes.
there are no Dumb Questions
Q: Why do you need to track the cost of testing?
A: You mean cost of quality, right? Cost of quality isn’t just the cost of testing. It’s the cost of all of your quality activities. Even preventive activities like spending time writing checklists and standards are part of it. The reason you track cost of quality is that it can tell you a lot about the health of your project as a whole.
Say you find you’re spending twice as much on quality activities as you are on building your product. You need to use that number to start asking some questions about the way the work is being done.
Are people not doing enough up front to prevent defects, and adding a lot of expensive test activities at the end of the project to compensate? Is the design not clear, so your team needs to do a lot of rework trying to get what the customer needs? There are many reasons that could be causing a high cost-of-quality number, but you wouldn’t even know to ask about them if you didn’t track it.
Q: How do you know your benchmarks before you start building?
A: That’s what your organizational process assets are for. Since your company keeps a record of all of the projects that have been done over the years, those projects’ quality measurements can help you gauge how your project will perform too. If your company knows that all of the projects in your division had a cost of quality that was 40% of the overall cost of development, you might set 40% cost of quality as a benchmark for your project as well. Your company might have stated a goal of having a schedule variance of plus or minus 10% on all projects for this calendar year. In that case, the schedule variance is a benchmark for your project.
Q: I don’t really have good requirements for my projects because everyone on the team starts out with just a good idea of what we’re building. How do I handle quality?
A: You should never do that. Remember how you spent all that time collecting requirements in the Collect Requirements process? Well, this is why you needed them. And it’s why it’s your responsibility to make sure that the project starts out with good, well-defined, and correct requirements. If you don’t have them, you can’t measure quality—and quality is an important part of project management.
Without requirements, you have no idea what the product is supposed to do, and that means you can’t judge its quality. You can learn a lot about a product by testing it, but if you don’t know its requirements, a product could pass all of its tests and still not do what the customer expects it to do. So having good requirements really is the only way to know whether or not your product is high quality.
Inspect your deliverables
It’s not enough to inspect the final product. You must look at all of the things that you make throughout a project to find bugs. In fact, the earlier you find them, the easier they are to fix. The Control Quality process is all about inspecting work products to find defects.
Control Quality is in the Monitoring and Controlling process group. As in Control Scope and Control Costs, you look at the work performance information that is coming from your project and compare it to your plan. If there are problems, you recommend a change. That way, you can either fix the problem or make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Use the planning outputs for Control Quality
You’ve come up with a plan to make sure each deliverable is right. Now it’s time to monitor the work that’s being done to the requirements—and that’s just a matter of following your plan! You’ll need to look at everything that is being produced and make sure that it stands up to all of the requirements that have been gathered. And you’ll need nearly everything you produced in Plan Quality Management in order to get a handle on your product’s quality.
Metrics make it easy for you to check how well your product meets expectations.
Tools for data gathering
You’ll need to gather data about the product or service your project is building to understand its quality. Expect a bunch of questions on these tools in the exam!
Checksheets allow you to collect data on the product under test. Checksheets are sometimes called checklists or tally sheets. You can use them to organize the test activities you’ll be performing and track whether the product passes or fails tests. Checksheets are often used as a means of gathering the data that’s displayed in trending and charting tools.
Statistical sampling is when you look at a representative sample of something to make decisions. For example, you might look at a selection of widgets produced in a factory to figure out which quality activities would help you prevent defects in them. Statistical sampling helps you make decisions about your product without looking at each and every thing you make. Lisa is responsible for the quality of the Black Box 3000TM, but there’s no way she can inspect each one as it comes off the assembly line. It makes sense for her to take a sample of the products and inspect those. From that sample she can learn enough about the project to make good judgments.
Questionnaires and surveys can be used to gather feedback from customers when they’ve had some time to use the product. Sometimes a defect is higher priority to a customer than the team anticipated, and surveys can uncover the customer’s perception of a product in a way that otherwise might be difficult for the team to understand.
Meetings are also a tool for Control Quality. (Meetings are not part of data gathering, but a tool on their own.)
Tools for data analysis
Once you have all of the data you have gathered from quality checksheets, surveys, and statistical sampling, you need to analyze it and look for differences between what you expected when you planned the project and how it is currently performing.
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Oops! This is part of the template for the page. We forgot to change it! Too bad we didn’t catch this when we were performing quality management.
Performance reviews are how you and your team will evaluate the current measurements of your product’s quality in comparison to the measurements you expected to see. Say you set a threshold in your Quality Management Plan for a software project that it should not contain more than 10 noncritical priority defects per 10,000 lines of code. In a performance review, you would review the number of defects encountered during tests to understand if the product was meeting that quality threshold.
Root cause analysis is all about evaluating the product your project is creating to understand why defects are occurring. It’s not enough to just find the problem, you need to trace it back to the thing that caused it. Sometimes you’ll end up asking “Why?” again and again until you finally identify a cause of multiple problems, which you can then fix with more impact than if you’d just fixed the initial problem.
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Taiichi Ohno, one of the first Lean thinkers, popularized the idea of root cause analysis by asking “Why?” five times to find the root of problems encountered as part of the Toyota Production System. This technique came to be called “the five whys.”
Inspection, testing, and product evaluation
As soon as you create deliverables on your project, your team inspects, tests, and evaluates them to make sure that they are meeting the standards you set when you were planning.
Inspection means comparing the deliverables in your project to the standards you’ve created for them. If deliverables don’t meet your project’s standards, you’ve found a defect. It’s not just the product of your project that gets inspected, though. You can inspect any interim deliverable as you go—and the sooner you inspect and find defects in a deliverable, the less expensive it is to fix. That’s why many agile practices focus on the creator of a document or product inspecting their own work as they build and using peer reviews to inspect deliverables before calling them done.
Testing/product evaluations are planned as part of the Plan Quality process. As new deliverables are made available throughout your project, the team tests them to understand how much they conform to the requirements that have been defined up front. Where the product doesn’t behave as specified, that’s considered a defect. Usually teams will review all of the defects found during testing to determine whether or not they need to be fixed and the impact of making those fixes on other planned work.
Tools for data representation
Once you’ve gathered data and analyzed it, you’ll need to show the data to other people to help drive decisions. These tools for data representation help visualize your data so that everyone in your project can use it to get a handle on quality in your project.
Histograms give you a good idea of how your data breaks down. If you heard that your product had 158 defects, you might think that they were all critical. So looking at a chart like this one would help you to get some perspective on the data. A lot of the bugs are low priority. It looks like only 28 or so are critical. Histograms are great for helping you to compare characteristics of data and make more informed decisions.
Cause and effect diagrams are also called fishbone and Ishikawa diagrams. They are used to figure out what caused a defect. You list all of the categories of the defects that you have identified and then write the possible causes of the defect you are analyzing from each category.
Fishbone diagrams help you see all of the possible causes in one place so you can think of how you might prevent the defect in the future.
Control charts are a way of visualizing how processes are doing over time. Let’s say that the button on each Black Box needs to be between 7.5 and 9.5 millimeters tall, and the chart above represents sample height measurements of boxes being made. Since we want the boxes to all be between 7.5 mm and 9.5 mm, the lower control limit of the chart is 7.5 mm, and the upper control limit is 9.5 mm. The chart above shows control limits as dashed lines. The mean is the solid line in the middle, and it shows the average height of all of the buttons in the sample. By looking at the chart above, you can see that there are a lot of buttons that were taller than 9.5mm manufactured and only one that was shorter than 7.5 mm. When a data point falls outside of the control limits, we say that data point is out of control, and when this happens we say that the entire process is out of control.
It’s pretty normal to have your data fluctuate from sample to sample. But when seven data points in a row fall on one side of the mean, that’s an uncommon enough occurrence that it means your process might have a problem. So when you see this, you need to look into it and try to figure out what’s going on. That’s called the rule of seven, and you’ll definitely see questions about it on the PMP exam.
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When you’re looking at the whole process, that’s called Manage Quality—and it’s coming up next.
Scatter diagrams show how two different types of data relate to each other. If you worked with your test team to create a bunch of new tests, you might use a scatter diagram to see if the new test cases had any impact on the number of defects you found. The chart here shows that as more test cases pass, fewer defects are found.
Control Quality means finding and correcting defects
When you look for bugs in your deliverables, you produce two kinds of things: outputs from the inspections and outputs from the repairs you’ve made. All of the outputs of the Control Quality process fall into those two categories.
Quality control measurements are all of the results of your inspections: the numbers of defects you’ve found, numbers of tests that passed or failed—stuff like that. You’ll use them when you look at the overall process you are using in your company to see if there are trends across projects.
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That’s coming up next in the Quality Assurance process.
Project Management plan updates You may need to update the Quality Management plan, which is a subplan of the Project Management plan.
Verified deliverables and validated changes are two of the most important outputs of Control Quality. Every single deliverable on the project needs to be inspected to make sure it meets your quality standards. If you find defects, the team needs to fix them—and then those repairs need to be checked, to make sure the defects are now gone.
Change requests are recommended or preventive actions that also require changes to the way you are doing your project. Those kinds of changes will need to be put through change control, and the appropriate baselines and plans will need to be updated if they are approved.
Work performance information might include all of the data your quality processes are producing. Once you’ve looked at the results of your quality tools, you might find places where the processes you’re using to build your product need to be changed. The data you collect in the Control Quality process can help you make those kinds of changes.
there are no Dumb Questions
Q: What exactly are Pareto charts for?
A: Pareto charts go together with the 80/20 rule. It says that 80 percent of the problems you’ll encounter in your project are caused by 20 percent of the root causes you can find. So if you find that most of your problems come from misunderstanding requirements, changing the way you gather requirements and making sure that everybody understands them earlier in the process will have a big impact on your project’s quality.
To get the data for your Pareto chart, first you have to categorize all of the defects that have been found in your project by their root causes. Then you can graph them in a Pareto chart to show the frequency of bugs found with each root cause and the percentage of the cumulative defects that are caused by each root cause. The one with the highest frequency is the root cause that you should work on first.
Q: If I am trying to prevent quality problems, why can’t I just test more?
A: You can find a lot of problems by testing. If you find them during testing, then you have to go back and fix them. The later you find them, the more expensive they are to fix. It’s much better for everybody if you never put the bugs in the product in the first place. It’s much easier to fix a problem in a specification document than it is to fix it in a finished product. That’s why most of the Plan Quality Management process group is centered on setting standards and doing reviews to be sure that bugs are never put into your product and, if they are, they’re caught as early as possible.
Q: I still don’t get that thing where a control chart can show you defects that are out of control, but also show you that your process is out of control.
A: The reason that’s a little confusing to some people is that you use the same tool to look at defects that you do when you’re looking at the whole process.
A lot of the time, you’ll use charts to measure processes, not just projects. They’re used to look at sample data from processes and make sure that they operate within limits over time. But they are considered Control Quality tools because those data samples come from inspecting deliverables as they are produced. Yes, it’s a little confusing, but if you think of control charts as the product of inspection, you’ll remember that they are Control Quality tools for the test.
Trouble at the Black Box 3000™ factory
It’s not enough to inspect your deliverables. Sometimes it’s the way you work that’s causing your problems. That’s why you need to spend some time thinking about how you will make sure you are doing the work efficiently and with as few defects as possible. The Manage Quality process is about tracking the way you work and improving it all of the time.
Introducing Manage Quality
In the Manage Quality process, you take all of the outputs from Plan Quality Management and Control Quality and look at them to see if you can find ways to improve your process. If you find improvements, you recommend changes to your process and your individual project plan to implement them.
A closer look at some tools and techniques
Fixing the bugs in your project solves the problems that give you trouble. But fixing bugs in your process means that other projects can learn from the problems you’ve faced and avoid your project’s bugs altogether. The tools that are used in quality assurance are the same as the ones in quality control, but they’re used to examine the process rather than the project.
Quality audits are when your company reviews your project to see if you are following its processes. The point is to figure out if there are ways to help you be more effective by finding the stuff you are doing on your project that is inefficient or causes defects. When you find those problem areas, you recommend corrective actions to fix them.
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Even if your company has the best process in the world, it doesn’t do your project any good if you don’t follow it!.
Design for X means designing your product to solve a particular problem. You might design a product to be particularly fast or to use fewer resources or to run in a distributed environment, for example. By designing to optimize a specific aspect of your product, you might be able to deliver higher value to a customer than if you had focused only on feature delivery.
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A lot of companies have Quality Assurance departments whose job is to perform these audits and report findings from projects to a process group.
Quality management and control tools are the same ones you already know about from earlier in this chapter. But instead of using them to look for problems with specific defects, you’ll use them to look at your overall process. A good example of this is using a control chart to see if your whole process is in control. If it’s not, then you’ll want to make a change to the whole way you do your work in order to bring it under control.
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Here’s another example. If you created a Pareto chart that showed all of the defects in all of your projects, you could find the one or two categories of defects that caused problems for the whole company. Then you could get all of the PMs together to figure out an improvement that they could all make that would help the whole company.
More ideas behind managing quality
There are a couple more things you need to know about managing quality. These are some of the most important ideas behind modern quality and process improvement.
Kaizen means continuous improvement. It’s all about constantly looking at the way you do your work and trying to make it better. Kaizen is a Japanese word that means improvement. It focuses on making small improvements and measuring their impact. Kaizen is a philosophy that guides management, rather than a particular way of doing quality assurance.
Just-in-time means keeping only the inventory you need on hand when you need it. So, instead of keeping a big inventory of parts sitting around, the Black Box company might have only the parts it needs for that day. Some companies have done away with warehouses altogether and have production lines take the parts directly off the trucks to do the work. If you’re working in a just-in-time shop, quality is really important because there isn’t any extra inventory to deal with mistakes.
Plan-Do-Check-Act is one way to go about improving your process, and it’s used by a lot of Kaizen practitioners. It was popularized by a well-known quality theorist named W. Edwards Deming and is also known as the Deming Cycle. Plan-Do-Check-Act is about making small improvements, and measuring how much benefit they make before you change your process to include them. Here’s how it works:
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Plan-Do-Check-Act was created by Walter Shewhart, who also created the control chart while he was working at Bell Labs in the 1920s.
You’re right. The Manage Quality process is all about improving the process, and that isn’t what most of project management is about. But your project is really affected by the process you are working in, so you should fully understand it and help to make it better wherever you can. The bottom line is that your project has a better chance of succeeding if you stay involved with process improvement and keep your eye on how your project stacks up to your company’s expectations of quality and process.
Fireside Chats
Tonight’s talk: Two quality processes discuss the best ways to correct problems on your project.
| Control Quality: | Manage Quality: |
| I’d like to go first, because I’m what most people think of as quality. Whenever you see one of those “Inspected by #8” stickers on the inside of your sneaker, that’s me! | |
| You’re right—most people do think that quality begins and ends with inspection. Which is funny, because we wouldn’t even need you if people paid attention to me. | |
| Whoa, there, buddy. That’s a strong statement! | |
| Now don’t get me wrong. Nobody’s ever felt comfortable enough with me that they’ve eliminated inspection entirely. You always need someone at the end of the line to look at what’s been produced and make sure that we delivered what we meant to. | |
| That’s right. And don’t forget, I’m everywhere. Any time you call for customer service, I’m there to tell you that your call will be recorded for quality purposes. I’m always warning you to make sure package contents haven’t shifted, and to check your car’s emissions once a year. | |
| Right, but don’t you get tired of doing all of that tedious work? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, after all. | |
| I guess I don’t really understand exactly how you do your job, then, because I’m having a hard time figuring out how I would ever be able to take a long weekend. | |
| Let’s take a look at those sneakers you mentioned. What’s the most common reason you throw a pair back to the factory floor to be restitched? | |
| Well, last week it was because the company logo came out upside-down on a bunch of the shoes. It turned out that the logo was being stitched into the leather and then put on another assembly line, and once in a while it was placed on the belt upside-down. | |
| That seems like an honest mistake. How much did it cost? | |
| We had to throw out about 10% of our sneakers last week. Let’s just say that the boss wasn’t happy. You could see the little veins in his forehead throbbing. It was kind of gross. | |
| Wow, that sounds expensive. What’s keeping it from happening again? | |
| The boss yelled at everyone, and we’ll check even more carefully to make sure we don’t ship it. | |
| So next week your inspection costs will be even higher, and you’ll probably still have to throw out just as many shoes, or more! | |
| Wow, I never thought of that. | |
| What if you painted a little arrow on the inside of the leather showing which direction the logo should be placed on the belt? | |
| We’d have to pay someone else to paint that on. This is no time to be increasing our costs! | |
| But a small increase in the cost of painting the leather will cause you to throw out a whole lot fewer sneakers. | |
| I call that cost of quality. You have to pay more to put quality in at the beginning, but you can reduce the number of inspectors and scrap a lot less product. In the end, I save you far more money than I cost. Can you say the same about yourself? | |
| Huh. Um. No. |
The Black Box 3000™ makes record profits!
People who bought the product were thrilled with it. They were happy that the Black Box company always kept its promises and the products were always high quality. The company managed to save a lot of money by implementing process improvement measures that caught defects before they cost too much money to fix. And Lisa got a big promotion—now she’s in charge of quality assurance for the whole company. Great job, Lisa!
Exam Questions
Which of the following is NOT a part of quality?
Fitness for use
Conformance to requirements
Value to the sponsor
Customer satisfaction
A project manager is using a histogram to analyze defects found by the team during inspection activities. What process is being performed?
Plan Quality Management
Control Quality
Manage Quality
Verify Scope
Which of the following is NOT an example of cost of quality?
Having team members spend extra time reviewing requirements with the stakeholders
Paying extra programmers to help meet a deadline
Hiring extra inspectors to look for defects
Sending a crew to repair a defective product that was delivered to the client
You’re working with an audit team to check that your company’s projects all meet the same quality standards. What process is being performed?
Plan Quality Management
Control Quality
Manage Quality
Perform Quality Management
You’re managing a project to deliver 10,000 units of custom parts to a manufacturer that uses just-in-time management. Which of the following constraints is most important to your client?
The parts must be delivered on time.
The parts must be delivered in a specific order.
The parts must conform to ISO specifications.
The parts must be packaged separately.
Which of the following is NOT part of the Quality Management plan?
Strategies for handling defects and other quality problems
Guidance on how the project team will implement the company’s quality policy
Metrics for measuring your project’s quality
A description of which deliverables don’t have to be inspected
Which of the following tools and techniques is used to show which categories of defects are most common?
Control charts
Pareto charts
Checksheets
Flowcharts
You’re managing a highway construction project. The foreman of your building team alerts you to a problem that the inspection team found with one of the pylons, so you use an Ishikawa diagram to try to figure out the root cause of the defect. What process is being performed?
Quality Management
Plan Quality Management
Control Quality
Manage Quality
Which tool or technique is used to break data into categories for analysis?
Scatter chart
Histogram
Checklist
Flowchart
When is inspection performed?
At the beginning of the project
Any time a project deliverable is produced
Just before the final product is delivered
At the end of the project
What’s the difference between Control Quality and Validate Scope?
Control Quality is done at the end of the project, while Validate Scope is done throughout the project.
Control Quality is performed by the project manager, while Validate Scope is done by the sponsor.
Control Quality is performed by the sponsor, while Validate Scope is done by the project manager.
Control Quality means looking for defects in deliverables, while Validate Scope means validating that the product is acceptable to the stakeholders.
You’re a project manager at a wedding planning company. You’re working on a large wedding for a wealthy client, and your company has done several weddings in the past that were very similar to the one you’re working on. You want to use the results of those weddings as a guideline to make sure that your current project’s quality is up to your company’s standards. Which tool or technique are you using?
Checklists
Benchmarking
Design of experiments
Cost-benefit analysis
You are using a control chart to analyze defects when something on the chart causes you to realize that you have a serious quality problem. What is the MOST likely reason for this?
The rule of seven
Upper control limits
Lower control limits
Plan-Do-Check-Act
Which of the following BEST describes defect repair review?
Reviewing the repaired defect with the stakeholder to make sure it’s acceptable
Reviewing the repaired defect with the team to make sure they document lessons learned
Reviewing the repaired defect to make sure it was fixed properly
Reviewing the repaired defect to make sure it’s within the control limits
The project team working on a project printing 3,500 technical manuals for a hardware manufacturer can’t inspect every single manual, so they take a random sample and verify that the manuals have been printed correctly. This is an example of:
Root cause analysis
Cost-benefit analysis
Benchmarking
Statistical sampling
What’s the difference between Control Quality and Manage Quality?
Control Quality involves charts like histograms and control charts, while Manage Quality doesn’t use those charts.
Control Quality and Manage Quality mean the same thing.
Control Quality means inspecting for defects in deliverables, while Manage Quality means auditing a project to check the overall process.
Manage Quality means looking for defects in deliverables, while Control Quality means auditing a project to check the overall process.
Which Control Quality tool is used to analyze processes by visualizing them graphically?
Checklists
Flowcharts
Pareto charts
Histograms
You are looking at a control chart to figure out if the way you are doing your project fits into your company’s standards. Which process are you using?
Plan Quality Management
Manage Quality
Control Quality
Quality Management
Which of the following is associated with the 80/20 rule?
Scatter chart
Histogram
Control chart
Pareto chart
Validated defect repair is an output of which process?
Integrated change control
Plan Quality Management
Control Quality
Manage Quality
Exam Answers
Answer: C
It’s important for projects to produce a valuable product, but value isn’t really a part of quality. That’s why earned value is part of Cost Management, not Quality Management.
Answer: B
In the Control Quality process, the team inspects the product for defects and uses the seven basic tools to analyze them. Since the defects came from inspection, you know it’s Control Quality.
Answer: B
Cost of quality is the time and money that you spend to prevent, find, or repair defects.
Answer: C
The Manage Quality process is all about how well your company meets its overall quality goals.
Note
Keep an eye out for fake process names like Perform Quality Management.
Answer: A
A manufacturer that uses just-in-time management is relying on its suppliers to deliver parts exactly when they’re needed. This saves costs, because it doesn’t have to warehouse a lot of spare parts.
Note
But those parts had better not have a lot of defects, because there aren’t a lot of spare parts lying around to do repairs!
Answer: D
Your project team needs to inspect ALL of the deliverables! That means every single thing that gets produced needs to be reviewed by team members, so they can find and repair defects.
Answer: B
A Pareto chart divides your defects into categories, and shows you the percentage of the total defects each of those categories represents. It’s really useful when you have a limited budget for Plan Quality Management and want to spend it where it’s most effective!
Note
Don’t forget that ALL deliverables need to be inspected, including the stuff you create—like the schedule, WBS, and Project Management plan. So you’ll get defects for them, too!
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Keep your eye out for questions asking you about Ishikawa or fishbone diagrams. When you use those tools to analyze defects, you’re in the Control Quality process.
Answer: B
A histogram is one of the seven basic tools of quality. It’s a bar chart that can be used to show how your data breaks down.
Answer: B
Inspection is when your team examines something that they produced for defects…and every single deliverable needs to be inspected! That’s what “prevention over inspection” means: if you produce a deliverable that’s needed later in the project today, it’s a lot cheaper to fix defects in it now than it will be when that deliverable is used later on in the project.
Answer: D
A lot of people get Control Quality and Validate Scope confused because they seem really similar. Both of them involve looking closely at deliverables to make sure that they meet requirements. But they serve really different purposes! You use Control Quality to find defects that you’re going to repair. Validate Scope happens at the very end of the Executing phase; it’s when you work with the stakeholder to get formal acceptance for the deliverables.
Note
You’d better have found all the defects before you take the product to the customer!
Answer: B
Benchmarking is when you use previous projects to set quality guidelines for your current project. You can always find the results of the past projects in the organizational process assets.
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The rule of seven tells you that when seven consecutive data points on your control chart come out on the same side of the mean, you’ve got a process problem. That sounds a little complicated, but it’s actually pretty straightforward. Defects tend to be scattered around pretty randomly; in any project that makes a lot of parts, even if they’re all within the specification, you’ll get a couple of parts that are a little bigger, and a couple that are a little smaller. But if you have a bunch of them in a row that all run a little big, that’s a good indication that something’s gone wrong on your assembly line!
Answer: C
Going back and repairing defects can be a pretty risky activity, because it’s really easy to introduce new defects or not fully understand why the defect happened in the first place. Answer C says exactly that: you go back and review the defects to make sure they’re fixed.
Answer: D
A lot of times it’s impractical to check every single product that rolls off of your assembly line. Statistical sampling is a great tool for that; that’s when you pull out a small, random sample of the products and inspect each of them. If they’re all correct, then there’s a very good chance that your whole product is acceptable!
Answer: C
A lot of people get confused about the difference between Control Quality and Manage Quality. Control Quality is where you inspect deliverables for defects, while Manage Quality is where you audit the project to make sure the quality activities were performed properly.
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A flowchart is one of the seven basic tools of quality. You use it to analyze processes that are part of your project in order to look for quality problems and inefficiencies.
Answer: B
You’re analyzing the process, so you are using Manage Quality.
Note
Just because you see a Control Quality tool, that doesn’t mean you’re in the Perform Control Quality process…because they’re also tools used in Manage Quality! You always need to figure out what you’re using them for.
Answer: D
Pareto charts are based on the 80/20 rule. They sort your defects in descending order by root cause. So you always know which 20% of root causes are responsible for 80% of defects on your project.
Answer: C
Control Quality is where you inspect your work, including your repairs!