Other Planning: Quality Planning

Quality Planning

• Quality refers to the performance and usability of the final product produced
• Quality planning ensure superior quality product delivered
• The quality planning involves identifying what constitutes quality for the project and devise methods to measure it

What Is Quality?

• The International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
  defines quality as “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfill requirements” (ISO9000:2000).
• Other experts define quality as
• Conformance to requirements means that the project’s processes and products meet written specifications
• Fitness for use means that a product can be used as it was intended

Quality items

• The first step in quality monitoring is to determine what needs to be measured
• Things to measure to access quality can be based on:
• Regulatory requirement (e.g. Government authority specifies that Internet provider needs to ensure 99% availability for its internet subscriber)
• Dependent on project (e.g. Improved customer satisfaction, ease of use of software, better web surfing speed)

Quality measurement

• After determining what are the things that will affect quality, we need to know how to measure them
• Method used to measure whether standard is met include:
• Metrics – defines how something can be measured. (E.g. A server can process 100 web request per minutes)
• Checklists – list out the tasks to be completed and states the results (E.g. 1: Hardware installed 2: Customer satisfied with prototype)

Quality Metrics

• A metric is a standard of measurement
• They allow organizations to measure their performance in certain areas and to compare them over time or with other organizations
• Examples of common metrics used includes failure rates of products produced, availability of goods and services, and customer satisfaction ratings

Quality Checklists

• A checklist is a list of items to be noted or consulted
• Verify that a set of required topics or steps has been covered or performed
• A single project can have many different checklists, such as for:
• Interviewing project team members
• Selecting suppliers
• Ensuring a room is ready for training

Cost of quality

• Cost of quality refers to the work needed to achieve quality product
• To ensure quality, added work needs to be done and it come at a cost
• This cost can be
• Prevention – covers activities that prevent quality problem from happening. (E.g. testing individual parts at early stages, training)
• Appraisal – covers activities that keep product defects from reaching the client (E.g. Inspection, testing, auditing)
• Failure – covers activities generated if the product fails after it has been delivered to customer(E.g. downtime, rework, troubleshooting)

Source: PMP, Prince2