Project Management Guide: Project Quality Planning

Back2Basics Project Management Guide - Project Planning

Back To Basics – Project Management Guide – Project Quality Planning

In previous post we got a glimpse of cost planning, in this post we will look at project quality planning.

You can jump to Project Planning | Project Scope | Delivery Schedule Planning | Resource Planning | Cost Planning | Quality Planning | Risk Planning | Communication Planning parts of this series.

Project Quality Planning

Project Management Guide - Project Quality Planning

There are various known approaches to ensure project quality – some of these are

  1. Six Sigma (6 s)
  2. Cost of Quality (CoQ)
  3. Total Quality Management (TQM)
  4. Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA)
  5. International Organization for Standardization 9001, etc.

All of these approaches essentially align with principles of project management such as careful planning in advance save a lot later, hence this section becomes necessary.

What does project quality planning involve?

To create project quality plan, project planner need to identify what are the quality requirements of the project, which all standards are we supposed to comply with and in what manner. Surely project quality plans undergoes changes just as the master project plan.

What can we expect project quality plan to highlight?

#

Item

Description

1
Quality Process & PoliciesThe policies about quality assurance process to be followed, quality controls to be in place, process improvement being adopted are detailed

2

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Project planner need to build the business cases to present cost-benefit analysis of quality assurance & control process to demonstrate benefits of ::

  • Significant avoidance of rework
  • Increase in productivity
  • Quality & Reliability of deliverables,

etc. factors which would satisfy quality expectations and accompanying cost implication.

3

Cost of Quality

This section gives stakeholders details of estimated cost to be incurred during the project lifecycle by virtue of quality control & quality process: bifurcating/highlighting the cost projection in terms of

  • Conformance cost (Prevention costs, appraisal cost)
  • Non-Conformance cost (internal failure cost, external fail. cost)

4

Quality Metrics

This section will establish the metrics based on which quality controls can be applied. Establishing quality metrics is very important to ensure stability and performance of the project. The parameters & permissible values such as availability (acceptable: 98.95%), failure rate (0.02%) & frequency, budget control (cost overrun <4%), etc all these essentially governs & indicate health of the project to the stakeholders.

5

Quality Checklist

Based on the best practices, the project quality planner may provide quality checklist to ensure specific set of project activities are performed in standardized manner. Such checklists are quite useful in quality controls.

6

Control Charts

This is chart representation to visualize process stability & performance. The project planner needs to specify the boundary & threshold limits to indicate when project stability or performance is getting compromised. At what levels who’s intervention is expected etc is being charted out.

Table 3: Project Quality Plan

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Back2Basics Project Management Guide - Project Planning

You can jump to Project Planning | Project Scope | Delivery Schedule Planning | Resource Planning | Cost Planning | Quality Planning | Risk Planning | Communication Planning parts of this series.

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