Anticlue

Quality Planning

Quality planning is the process which identifies which quality standards are important to the project and determines a way to satisfy the relevant standards. Project managers normally develop the quality requirement as a part of the Planning Process Group.

The inputs to the quality planning process are:

• Enterprise environmental factors - Enterprise environmental factors are any or all external environmental and internal organizational influences on a projects success. The purpose of inputting enterprise environmental factors into the quality planning process is to assure your plan is cognizant of the bigger picture.
• Organizational process assets - Organizational process assets are any process-related assets which can influence the projects outcome. Assets commonly include informal or formal quality policies, guidelines, and procedures, as well as historical databases related to quality.
• Project Scope Statement - The Project Scope Statement describes the major deliverables, acceptance criteria for the deliverables, objectives, assumptions, constraints, and a statement of work for the project. The Project Scope Statement provides a basis for making future project decisions. Project Managers commonly plan project activities so that the project deliverables meet the desired level of quality.
• Project Management Plan - The Project Management Plan defines how the project is expected to behave through the executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing process groups. In addition, it specifies that a quality plan and philosophy will be adopted, and it refers to other quality procedures that may be relevant. The Project Management Plan details the completed project work to be inspected and verified.

While engaged in Quality Planning, there are some common tools and techniques which project managers employ during the process. Quality Planning can be completed using the following tools and techniques:

• Cost-benefit analysis - A cost-benefit analysis evaluates the cost-benefit tradeoffs for making a potential change. Since quality planning is the art of considering tradeoffs, project managers use cost-benefit analysis to determine the cost-effectiveness of assuring product quality.
  The steps to perform a cost-benefit analysis are:
  1. List and calculate the direct and indirect costs.
  2. List and Calculate the Benefits.
  3. Compare the resulting Costs to Costs and Benefits to Benefits.
  
  Direct costs are the estimated financial costs from budget making and planning including expenses from equipment, operators, personnel, training, materials, utilities, contractual services, and facility construction. Indirect cost estimate shared resources including infrastructure maintenance, administration expenses, and safety costs.
• Design of experiments (DOE) – Design of experiments is a statistical method which identifies influencing factors of the product or process being created. This technique provides a way to change all of the influencing factors at once instead of on a factor by factor basis.
• Benchmarking – Benchmarking engages in comparing projects as a basis to measure performance.
• Costs of Quality (COQ) – Costs of Quality are the total costs incurred by investing in preventing nonconformance to requirements, appraising the conformance to requirements, and failing to meet the requirements.
• Additional Quality Planning tools - Additional Quality Planning tools which help project and quality managers are as follows:
  1. Affinity diagramming – The affinity diagram helps to categorize brainstorming ideas.
  2. Force field analysis – Force field analysis examines and evaluates all the forces for and against a decision. Project managers use this method to weigh the pros and cons of a decision.
  3. Nominal group techniques – Nominal group techniques are structured procedures that identify and rank major problems or key issues that need to be addressed. Project managers may use this method to obtain multiple ideas from team members on a particular problem or issue.
  4. Matrix diagrams – Matrix diagrams are used to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of alternatives based on the relationship between two criteria. A project manager can use a matrix diagram to analyze the relationship between project cost and project performance.
  5. Flowcharts - Flowcharts are graphical representations of a process. A flowchart allows a project team to create a diagram of the events in a process. By examining flowcharts carefully, the project team can often identify gaps in workflow that could cause problems and errors.

You can increase your chances of achieving quality in a product by understanding the Quality Planning outputs. The Quality Planning outputs are:

• Quality Management Plan - The Quality Management Plan describes how the team will implement the performing organization's quality policy. The Quality Management Plan should include a way to assure the previous design decisions are valid perhaps through a peer review.
• Process Improvement Plan - The Process Improvement Plan lists the steps for analyzing processes that expedite the identification of ineffective wasteful process or non-value added activities. The components of the process improvement plan are:
  1. Process Boundaries – Process boundaries detail the purpose, start and end of the process, inputs and outputs, data needed, and the owner and stakeholders of the process
  2. Process Configuration – Process Configuration is a flowcharts o the process which assist with analysis of the interfaces detailed.
  3. Process Metrics - Process Metrics are to provide a guideline of control over the status of a process.
  4. Targets for improved performance – Targets for improved performance guides the process improvement activities.
• Project Management Plan updates - Project Management Plan updates result from Quality Planning. Specifically, the Project Management Plan will be updated because you will have developed two of its subsidiary plans: the Quality Management Plan and the Process Improvement Plan.
• Quality checklists - Quality checklists are used to validate that all the steps of a process are complete and that all the components of a deliverable are in place. Using checklists ensures that deliverables are consistent and contain all the necessary information.
• Quality baseline - A quality baseline records the project's quality objectives. The quality baseline establishes the acceptable quality levels by which project deliverables are measured.
• Quality metrics - Quality metrics describe the specific attributes of the project work that will be measured to determine whether the work meets quality standards. Quality metrics are used to provide information on cost, rework, and cycle time to improve the quality of the project deliverables and work processes. Examples of quality metrics include defect density, failure rate, availability, reliability, and test coverage.