1. What is Project Quality Management?
Quality can be defined as “the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.”
For IT projects, quality can be considered through two aspects:
Conformance to requirements – the project’s processes and products meet written specifications
Fitness for use – a product can be used as it was intended
The purpose of project quality management is “to ensure that the project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken.”

2. What is Project Quality Management? (Cont.)
Project quality management involves three main processes as follows:
Quality planning – identifying which quality standards are relevant to the project and how to satisfy those standards
Quality assurance – periodically evaluating overall project performance to ensure the project will satisfy the relevant quality standards
Quality control – monitoring specific project results to ensure that they comply with the relevant quality standards while identifying ways to improve overall quality

3. Quality Planning
Communicating the correct actions for ensuring quality in a format that is understandable and complete
Describing important factors that directly contribute to meeting the customer’s requirements such as:
Organizational policies related to quality
The particular project’s scope statement and product descriptions
Related standards and regulation
Providing the main outputs such as:
A quality management plan
Checklists for ensuring quality throughout the project life cycle

4. Quality Planning (Cont.)
Important scope aspects of IT projects that affect quality and should be included in quality planning are:
Functionality (the degree to which a system performs its intended function) and features (the system’s special characteristics that appeal to users)
Clarify what functions and features the system must perform, and what functions and features are optional.
System outputs (the screens and reports the system generates)
Define clearly what the screens and reports look like for a system

5. Quality Planning (Cont.)
Performance (how well a product or service performs the customer’s intended use)
Completely address all the requirements (such as volumes of data and transactions, the number of simultaneous users, speed of the response time and so on)
Reliability (the ability of a product or service to perform as expected under normal conditions without unacceptable failures) and maintainability (the ease of performing maintenance on a product)
Define stakeholders’ expectations (such as the normal conditions for operating the system and providing Help Desk support)

6. Quality Assurance Goals of Quality assurance are:
To satisfy the relevant quality standards for a project
To continuously improve quality
Tools for quality assurance are:
Benchmarking – a technique for generating ideas for quality improvements by comparing specific project practices or product characteristics to those of other projects or products within or outside the performing organization
Quality audit – a structured review of specific quality management activities that help identify lessons learned that could improve performance on current or future projects

7. Quality Control The main outputs of this process are:
Acceptance decisions determine if the products or services produced as part of the project will be accepted or rejected. (If project stakeholders reject some of the products or services produced as part of the project, there must be rework.)
Rework is action taken to bring rejected items into compliance with product requirements or specifications or other stakeholder expectations. (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.

8. Tools & Techniques for Quality Control
Pareto Analysis involves identifying the vital few contributors that account for most quality problems in a system.

9. Tools & Techniques for Quality Control
Statistical Sampling involves choosing part of a population of interest for inspection.
Six Sigma involves five-phase improvement process called DMAIC, which stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
Quality Control Charts & the Seven Run Rule
A quality control chart is a graphic display of data that illustrates the results of a process over time.
The seven run rule states that if seven data points in a row are all below the mean, above the mean, or are all increasing or decreasing, then the process needs to be examined for nonrandom problems.

10. Quality Control Chart