Project Management: Quality Management

Course Overview

The drive to meet cost and time constraints within a project often compromises quality. Project success is assured by taking a balanced approach to quality, time and cost, resulting in satisfied customers.

In this course, you develop and apply a quality framework using the tools and techniques needed to deliver consistent project success within your organisation. At the end of this course, you take away project quality tools and templates for use back at your job.

Audience

This course is valuable for project managers who wish to elevate the level of quality in their projects. Experience at the level of Course 296, " Project Management: Skills for Success ", or Course 340, " Project Management for Software Development ", is strongly recommended.

Skills Gained

• Implement effective project quality management best practices
• Apply a proven analysis method to identify stakeholder quality expectations and refine project scope
• Leverage an industry standard template to create a project Quality Management Plan (QMP)
• Generate a quality assurance task list that incorporates project, product and process
• Transform quality assurance recommendations into corrective and improvement actions
• Design and implement quality control gates throughout the project and product life cycles

Course Outline

Overview of Quality Management Skills

• Determining your current quality management knowledge
• Elevating personal awareness

Building a Project Quality Environment

Discovering stakeholder quality needs

• Eliciting and specifying quality requirements
• Analysing and validating costs and benefits
• Finalising the stakeholder expectations

Identifying overall project scope

• Capturing initial project objectives and deliverables
• Categorising expectations, needs and wants
• Determining project quality tolerance levels

Consolidating project quality requirements

• Balancing the project, product and process quality requirements priorities
• Refining the project scope statement

Developing a Project Quality Management Plan

Reviewing standards and best practices

• PMI PMBOK(R) Guide
• PRINCE2(TM)
• ISO
• CMMI

Balancing project, product and process quality constraints

• Reconciling project, product and process quality requirements
• Detailing project quality activities, roles and responsibilities

The key components of an effective QMP

• Stakeholders' expectations and requirements
• Acceptance criteria
• Relevant standards
• Quality responsibilities
• Quality Assurance (QA)
• Quality Control (QC)
• Supporting quality tools and techniques

Establishing Quality Assurance Strategies

Matching techniques to the project life cycle

• Mandatory and optional Gates
• Acting upon observations, deviations and nonconformances

Incorporating tasks into the QMP

• Generating quality assurance task list
• Estimating the required effort and resources
• Enhancing the QMP using CMMI PPQA process area

Implementing Quality Assurance

Reviewing the quality assurance reports

• Root cause analysis
• Planning corrective actions
• Leveraging feedback to improve processes

Developing corrective actions

• Estimating time and resources to address deficiencies
• Incorporating changes into the project plan

Invoking corrective procedures

• Raising change requests as appropriate
• Updating the organisational processes
• Ensuring continuous quality improvement

Designing Project Quality Control Gates

Specifying QC Gates

• Determining and designing QC Gates based on product life cycle milestones
• Inputs
• Outputs
• Tools and techniques
• Participants

Integrating QC Gates into the QMP

• Calculating the required time and resources
• Assigning roles and responsibilities

Selecting QC Tools and Techniques

Differentiating common tools and techniques

• Cause and Effect Diagram
• Checksheet
• Shewhart's Control Chart
• Histogram
• Pareto Chart
• Scatter Diagram

Weighing the advantages and disadvantages

• Defining selection criteria and guidelines
• Benefits
• Reasons
• Usage
• Limitations
• Examples
• Assigning tools and techniques to QC Gates

Finalising the QMP

• Reviewing the complete QMP for the project
• Integrating skills learned into your own organisation