Chapter 8 Project Quality Management Essay

Chapter 8 - Project Quality Management  Essay 77. List and briefly describe the three project quality management processes. ANSWER: 1. Planning quality management includes identifying which quality requirements and standards are relevant to the project and how to satisfy them. Incorporating quality standards into project design is a key part of quality planning. For an IT project, quality standards might include allowing for system growth, planning a reasonable response time for a system, or ensuring that the system produces consistent and accurate information. Quality standards can also apply to IT services. For example, you can set standards for how long it should take to get a reply from a help desk or how long it should take to ship a replacement part for a hardware item under warranty. The main outputs of planning quality management are a quality management plan, quality metrics, project management plan updates, and project documents updates. A metric is a standard of measurement. Examples of common metrics include failure rates of products, availability of goods and services, and customer satisfaction ratings. 2. Managing quality involves translating the quality management plan into executable quality activities. These activities must adhere to the organization's quality policies. The main outputs of this process are quality reports, test and evaluation documents, change requests, project management plan updates, and project documents updates. 3. Controlling quality involves monitoring specific project results to ensure that they are complete, correct, and meet customer expectations. This process is often associated with the technical tools and techniques of quality management, such as Pareto charts, quality control charts, and statistical sampling. You will learn more about these tools and techniques later in this chapter. The main outputs of quality control include quality control measurements, verified deliverables, work performance information, change requests, project management plan updates, and project documents updates. POINTS: 1 DIFFICULTY: Difficulty: Moderate REFERENCES: p.330-331 QUESTIONTYPE:Essay HASVARIABLES:False LEARNINGOBJE INFO.SCHW.14.55 - LO: 8-2 CTIVES: NATIONALSTAND United States - BUSPROG: Analytic ARDS: TOPICS: What Is Project Quality Management? KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Comprehension DATECREATED: DATEMODIFIED:  78. What are the three main outcomes of quality control? Briefly describe each. ANSWER: Acceptance decisions determine if the products or services produced as part of the project will be accepted or rejected. If they are accepted, they are considered to be validated deliverables. If project stakeholders reject some of the products or services produced as part of the project, there must be rework. Page34 Chapter 8 - Project Quality Management Rework is action taken to bring rejected items into compliance with product requirements or specifications or other stakeholder expectations. Rework often results in requested changes and validated defect repair, resulting from recommended defect repair or corrective or preventive actions. Rework can be very expensive, so the project manager must strive to do a good job of quality planning and quality assurance to avoid this need. Process adjustments correct or prevent further quality problems based on quality control measurements. Process adjustments are often found by using quality control measurements, and they often result in updates to the quality baseline, organization process assets, and the project management plan. POINTS: 1 DIFFICULTY: Difficulty: Moderate REFERENCES: p.336 QUESTIONTYPE:Essay HASVARIABLES:False LEARNINGOBJE INFO.SCHW.14.58 - LO: 8-5 CTIVES: NATIONALSTAND United States - BUSPROG: Analytic ARDS: TOPICS: Controlling Quality KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Comprehension DATECREATED: DATEMODIFIED:  79. What are the five phases in the DMAIC process? Briefly describe each one. ANSWER: Define: Define the problem/opportunity, process, and customer requirements. Important tools used in this phase include a project charter, a description of customer requirements, process maps, and Voice of the Customer (VOC) data. Examples of VOC data include complaints, surveys, comments, and market research that represent the views and needs of the organization’s customers. Measure: Define measures, then collect, compile, and display data. Measures are defined in terms of defects per opportunity. Analyze: Scrutinize process details to find improvement opportunities. A project team working on a Six Sigma project, normally referred to as a Six Sigma team, investigates and verifies data to prove the suspected root causes of quality problems and substantiates the problem statement. An important tool in this phase is the fishbone or Ishikawa diagram. Improve: Generate solutions and ideas for improving the problem. A final solution is verified with the project sponsor, and the Six Sigma team develops a plan to pilot test the solution. The Six Sigma team reviews the results of the pilot test to refine the solution, if needed, and then implements the solution where appropriate. POINTS: DIFFICULTY: REFERENCES: Control: Track and verify the stability of the improvements and the predictability of the solution. Control charts are one tool used in the control phase. 1 Difficulty: Moderate p.334 Page35 Chapter 8 - Project Quality Management QUESTIONTYPE:Essay HASVARIABLES:False LEARNINGOBJE INFO.SCHW.14.59 - LO: 8-6 CTIVES: NATIONALSTAND United States - BUSPROG: Analytic ARDS: TOPICS: Tools And Techniques For Quality Control KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Comprehension DATECREATED: DATEMODIFIED:  80. Describe the relationship between Six Sigma and statistics. What statistical concepts are involved in the Six Sigma philosophy? ANSWER: An important concept in Six Sigma is improving quality by reducing variation. The term sigma means standard deviation. Standard deviation measures how much variation exists in a distribution of data. A small standard deviation means that data clusters closely around the middle of a distribution and there is little variability among the data. A large standard deviation means that data is spread out around the middle of the distribution and there is relatively greater variability. A normal distribution is a bell-shaped curve that is symmetrical regarding the mean or average value of the population (the data being analyzed). In any normal distribution, 68.3 percent of the population is within one standard deviation (1sigma) of the mean, 95.5 percent of the population is within two standard deviations (2sigma), and 99.7 percent of the population is within three standard deviations (3sigma) of the mean. Standard deviation is a key factor in determining the acceptable number of defective units found in a population. A plus or minus six sigma in pure statistical terms means only two defective units per billion. However, the target for Six Sigma programs is 3.4 defects per million opportunities. Based on Motorola’s original work on Six Sigma in the 1980s, the convention used for Six Sigma is a scoring system that accounts for more variation in a process than you would typically find in a few weeks or months of data gathering. In other words, time is an important factor in determining process variations. POINTS: 1 DIFFICULTY: Difficulty: Moderate REFERENCES: p.346-347 QUESTIONTYPE:Essay HASVARIABLES:False LEARNINGOBJE INFO.SCHW.14.59 - LO: 8-6 CTIVES: NATIONALSTAND United States - BUSPROG: Analytic ARDS: TOPICS: Tools And Techniques For Quality Control KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Comprehension DATECREATED: DATEMODIFIED: 81. What are the five major cost categories related to quality? Briefly describe each category. ANSWER: Prevention cost: The cost of planning and executing a project so that it is error-free or within an Page36 Chapter 8 - Project Quality Management acceptable error range. Preventive actions such as training, detailed studies related to quality, and quality surveys of suppliers and subcontractors fall under this category. Detecting defects in information systems during the early phases of the systems development life cycle is much less expensive than during the later phases. One hundred dollars spent refining user requirements could save millions by finding a defect before implementing a large system. The Year 2000 (Y2K) issue provides a good example of these costs. If organizations had decided during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that all dates would need four characters to represent the year instead of two characters, they would have saved billions of dollars. Appraisal cost: The cost of evaluating processes and their outputs to ensure that a project is error-free or within an acceptable error range. Activities such as inspection and testing of products, maintenance of inspection and test equipment, and processing and reporting inspection data all contribute to appraisal costs of quality. Internal failure cost: A cost incurred to correct an identified defect before the customer receives the product. Items such as scrap and rework, charges related to late payment of bills, inventory costs that are a direct result of defects, costs of engineering changes related to correcting a design error, premature failure of products, and correcting documentation all contribute to internal failure cost. External failure cost: A cost that relates to all errors not detected and not corrected before delivery to the customer. Items such as warranty cost, field service personnel training cost, product liability suits, complaint handling, and future business losses are examples of external failure costs. Measurement and test equipment costs: The capital cost of equipment used to perform prevention and appraisal activities. POINTS: 1 DIFFICULTY: Difficulty: Moderate REFERENCES: p.356-357 QUESTIONTYPE:Essay HASVARIABLES:False LEARNINGOBJE INFO.SCHW.14.61 - LO: 8-8 CTIVES: NATIONALSTAND United States - BUSPROG: Analytic ARDS: TOPICS: Improving IT Project Quality KEYWORDS: Bloom's: Comprehension DATECREATED: DATEMODIFIED:  Page37