1. Successful IT Projects By Darren Dalcher & Lindsey Brodie
Chapter 8

2. Project Quality Management
Lecture 8
Project Quality Management

3. Learning outcomes Understand the importance of quality management
Describe the main processes of project quality management and understand how they relate to projects
Describe several quality control techniques
Understand the contribution of the major quality experts to quality management
Discuss quality standards and models

4. What is quality? Quality of design: Quality of conformance:
Decide the level of quality required - characteristics of the product or service such as grade of materials and performance specifications
Quality of conformance:
The degree to which the design specifications are met or ‘conformance to requirements’
Fitness for purpose:
Means that the product can be used for the purpose it was intended. Usually considered more rigorous than ‘fitness for use’

5. Different views of quality
Quality as:
A product-based quantity
A user-based view
A specification
A value-based approach
A transcendent property
A continuous property

6. The cost of quality
Cost of quality (COQ) includes all the costs associated with quality-related processes
Cost of quality factors:
Prevention costs (includes quality planning, technical reviews, test equipment and training)
Appraisal costs (includes inspections and testing)
Failure costs
Internal failure costs (rework)
External failure costs (helpline support and fixing customer fault reports)

7. The cost of quality Crosby (1980) COQ = POC + PONC
Cost of quality (COQ)
Price of conformance (POC): price of ensuring “things are done right the first time”. The sum of prevention costs and appraisal costs
Price of non-conformance (PONC): the failure costs

8. Cost to fix escalates as you move towards field use
IBM
average
Relative cost to fix an error x x
10x
3 - 6x 1
Requirements
Design
Coding
Development
Testing
Acceptance
Testing
Operation

9. Project quality management
Quality planning:
Identifying the relevant requirements, quality procedures and standards, and determining how a project will meet them. Must have both product/system metrics and project process metrics
Quality assurance:
Carrying out the planned quality activities to ensure the project delivers a quality product/service
Quality control:
Monitoring the project results to ensure they meet the relevant quality standards. Outputs include quality control status reports, rework and process improvements

10. Quality control methods
Management reviews
Testing
Pareto analysis
Control charts
Walkthroughs
Inspections
Already discussed
in Lecture 4

11. An example of a Pareto diagram
(Note all percentages are rounded down)
200
100%
185
160
80%
142
Number of defects reported over a given time period
120
60%
Cumulative Percentage 80
40% 40
20% 30 20 10 0%
Insufficient Qualifier Data
Missing Source Information
Missing Benchmark Data
Missing Status Data
Missing Target Level

12. An example of a control chart
Upper Control Limit
Violation of control limits
3
2 
Mean
Time 
2
3
Lower Control Limit

13. Control charts
Chance causes: tend to lie within the control limits - only a one in a thousand chance of not doing so
Special causes (assignable causes or sporadic causes): controlled at the local or operational level. Eliminating these means the process returns to its controlled state. Identified by looking for patterns that suggest non-random behaviour in the control chart. Corrective actions are needed to remove special causes. For example, can detect when manufacturing equipment is becoming defective
Common causes (endemic causes or chronic causes): inherent in the process, only if the basic process is altered will they change

14. Walkthroughs A walkthrough is a type of peer group review
Informal and lasts 1 to 1.5 hours
Purpose is no enforce standards, detect errors and improve visibility of the material and overall system quality
Product author typically describes the structure and logic of the material being reviewed
A co-ordinator plans and organises the walkthrough
An action list of problems and questions is generated
Outcome is a decision about whether the material can be accepted as it is or whether it needs revision and even a further walkthrough

15. Inspections Carried out on written documentation
Originally developed by Michael Fagan for use on source code
Now extended by Tom Gilb for use on earlier system documents (requirements specifications and even contracts)
Also extended by Robert Mays (IBM) to support continuous process improvement
Gilb has moved focus from defect finding and fixing towards sampling to determine quality (better to rewrite than fix if a high number of defects)

16. Inspection Inspection must be economic
Can be used for training about standards
Does not replace testing, but can be argued to find defects earlier
Checkers are given roles
Use rules and checklists to find ‘issues’
Check against source and kin documents
Author has final say if ‘issues’ are ‘defects’

17. Overview of the inspection process
Main Specification,
Source Documents,
Kin Documents,
Rules
and Checklists
Process
Meeting
Entry
Planning
Kickoff
Checking
Specification
Meeting
Edit
Edit
Audit
Exit
Strategy
Statistics
Quality Checked
Main Specification,
Change Requests for
Source and Kin Documents
and Suggested Process
Improvements

18. Quality metrics How can quality be expressed?
Think back to Lecture 2 and the discussion on success criteria being picked up as project objectives
Remember Doran’s SMART method
Think back also to Lecture 4 and the discussion about quality requirements
Earlier in this lecture under quality planning, we mentioned product/system metrics and project process metrics

19. Key contributors to the quality movement
Walter Shewhart
W. Edwards Deming
Joseph Juran
Philip Crosby
Kaoru Ishikawa

20. Walter Shewhart
Encouraged managers to think about problem prevention and process improvement
Developed:
The control chart (discussed earlier)
The Plan/Do/Check/Act cycle for process improvement

21. The Shewhart Cycle or Deming Cycle
Decide Actions
Needed
Plan Actions
Act
Plan
Study* Do
Study Results
of Actions Taken
Execute Plans
* Shewhart used ‘Check’, while Deming preferred ‘Study’

22. W. Edwards Deming Deming popularised the Shewhart cycle
Came to fame after working in Japan to help the Japanese improve the quality of their manufactured products
Promoted the concept:
Quality is a management issue: common causes often beyond the ability of the worker to fix and so require management action

23. Joseph Juran
Juran defined quality from a customer’s viewpoint as ‘fitness for use’ (five attributes: quality of design, quality of conformance, availability, safety and field use)
Juran’s message was that quality must be planned
The ‘Juran Trilogy’
Quality planning
Quality improvement
Quality control

24. Philip Crosby Cost of Quality (COQ) = Price of Conformance (POC)
+ Price of Non-conformance (PONC)
4 Absolutes of Quality Management:
Quality is defined as conformance to requirements
Quality comes from prevention
Quality sets the performance standard at ‘zero defects’
Quality is measured by the cost of non-conformance
Insisted that ‘Quality is Free’

25. Kaoru Ishikawa Developed:
Quality circles: teams within one or more organisations meet regularly to discuss how to improve a work process. They devise and try out corrective actions, and report back. Meetings are held until the team decides to disband
‘Cause and effect’ diagrams known as Ishikawa diagrams or fishbone diagrams

26. An Ishikawa diagram or fishbone diagram
Inexperienced
project team
Too many bugs
Lack of inspections
Insufficient prior
project experience
Too many
last minute changes
Poor training
Work rushed
Software not
delivered on-time
New hardware
arrived late
Requirements
specification
too imprecise
Too much rework
Poor documentation
Unrealistic deadlines
Lack of knowledge
of Evaluation Criteria
New technology
Too much work
Other?

27. Continuous improvement
Continuously striving to produce better products and improve processes
Key requirement is that an organisation has stable processes so that the impact of any change can be understood. (Often misinterpreted as that an organisation has to have processes!)

28. Six Sigma
Holistic approach to quality. An organisation sets high six sigma goals and uses continuous process improvement
Six sigma goal is no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities (think back to control charts)
Adopted by Motorola and General Electric Company (GEC)
Builds on the work of the quality gurus such as Deming, Juran and Crosby
Originally a five step DMAIC improvement process. It has now become eight step

29. Six Sigma improvement process
Identify the project
Define the project
Measure current process performance
Analyse/probe the problem
Develop the improved process
Implement the changes
Control - measure and hold the gains
Communicate - exploit the achievement in other areas

30. Industry quality standards
ISO 9000:2000 Standards for quality management with respect to improved customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. Focuses on eight principles:
Customer focus
Leadership
Involvement of people
Process approach
System approach to management
Continual improvement
Factual approach to decision making
Mutually beneficial supplier relationships
See

31. Industry quality standards
TickIT
TickIT provides a framework for organisations to get certification under the ISO 9001:2000 framework
Develops quality management system certification procedures:
Publishes guidance material for interpreting the requirements of ISO 9001
Advises on training, selecting and registering auditors with IT experience and competence
Introduces rules for the accreditation of certification bodies in the software sector
(see

32. Maturity models
Provide frameworks for organisations to assess their overall capability
Aim to help organisations understand what they need to do to achieve process improvement or enhance organisational capability

33. Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
Developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon university. See
Originally CMM but integrated other models to become CMMI
Two instantiations:
Staged CMMI: assesses a whole organisation’s process capability at one of five maturity levels
Continuous CMMI: assesses different process areas across an organisation individually, so a set of maturity levels results

34. The CMMI staged diagram: the maturity levels
Optimising
Level 4
Quantitatively
Managed
Level 3
Defined
Level 2
Managed
Level 1
Initial

35. CMMI Maturity Level 1: Initial: processes are ad hoc and chaotic
Maturity Level 2: Managed: processes are planned, performed, measured and controlled
Maturity Level 3: Defined: Processes are qualitatively predictable
Maturity Level 4: Quantitatively Managed: Processes are understood in statistical terms and special causes are addressed. Processes are quantitatively predictable
Maturity Level 5: Optimising: Focus on improving process performance by removing common causes

36. Project management maturity models
Aim to improve and standardise project management processes
The Project Management Institute (PMI) produced an Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3).
This builds on the project management processes described in Lecture 1 (initiating processes, planning processes, executing processes, monitoring and controlling processes, and closing processes)
Extends into programme and portfolio management (think back to Lecture 2)

37. Summary Discussed: Seen that Quality:
Current ideas on project quality management
Key people who have shaped quality management
Seen that Quality:
Must be designed into a product
Not just about errors and their elimination: it is also about prevention
Is a dynamic concept
Is concerned with the usefulness and acceptability of a product to its users and the project clients