Perform Quality Assurance

00:01 Hello and welcome.

00:02 This module focuses on the perform quality assurance process in the PMBOK guide.

00:10 It has high exam importance.

00:14 Because there will be questions on this executing process, as we know, 30 percent of the questions in the exam are on executing activities and therefore this being an executing activity. There will be many questions on this.

00:31 So focus on this area, the difficulty is rated as medium because some of these things you may not already do in your project while you're very focused on that product quality.

00:43 But the concepts are easy to understand and therefore memorization is low.

00:50 The particular domain task that performed quality assurance process helps us understand better is executing Task three, which says implement the quality management plan using the appropriate tools and techniques in order to ensure that work is performed in accordance with required quality standards.

01:14 The key theme of this process is that we are committing to steadily improving our activities and processes used to achieve quality.

01:25 Remember, the focus of this process is on processes, not product.

01:34 The key inputs are, and there it is, the quality management plan. Of course, we want that because that's the plan that provides guidance on how we're going to do quality assurance on our project.

01:49 We might also have a process improvement plan, which is a specific part and subsidiary of the Quality Management Plan, dedicated and devoted just to process improvement.

02:02 We'll also have some quality metrics, some quality control measurements and other relevant project documents, such as audit sheets or frequency of audits, those sorts of things.

02:17 The particular tools and techniques that we may choose to use.

02:22 It's a general catch-all tool on technique, this one.

02:24 And it appears like this again and the control quality process.

02:30 What it's referring to is those tools and techniques that were first referred to and plan quality management, mainly Ishikawa's seven quality tools.

02:41 So we'll go over those very quickly, but we went over them in depth and the plan quality management module, which you may have already watched.

02:50 Another tool or technique we may wish to use is quality audits.

02:56 And these are actually pretty essential for quality assurance now, quality audits should always be done by independent people.

03:04 Somebody outside of the project just to maintain transparency and independency. So with your audits? You should choose which projects are going to be ordered audited, is it going to be all of them? Is it going to be some of them? And if it's some of them, how are they going to be selected? Is it going to be those over a certain financial threshold or risk threshold? Or are they going to be randomly selected? The audit should be carried out with the cooperation of the project manager, and remember, an audit isn't looking to blame people.

03:42 It is committing and it's looking for improvement opportunities.

03:46 So the audit report will point those out.

03:51 So remember, quality assurance uses quality audits as its main tool.

03:57 This is particularly important way to distinguish between this process and the control quality process, which uses inspections as one of its primary tools. A for audit, a for assurance.

04:12 Another tool or technique we may find useful is process analysis, and this is simply exactly what it says it is.

04:20 We have all these processes in place from our project management methodology that we are following an order to deliver a great project.

04:28 Now we need to check that the process is correct and that it's appropriate.

04:33 Does it need tailoring or customizing any more? Are people deliberately avoiding part of the process? And if so, why? Don't forget it may not be the people's fault.

04:43 It may actually be. The process is wrong.

04:46 So take a look at the processes that you're using, and as I've said, they're normally represented by our project management methodology.

04:55 Let's take a quick look at Ishikawa's seven quality tools.

05:00 As I've already said, these are covered more in depth and the planned quality management module. Essentially, they are just seven tools to take complex statistical information and present it in an easy to understand graphical format.

05:16 And they include the cause and effect diagram fishbone or Ishikawa diagram control chart check sheet, scatter diagram, pareto diagram, histogram and flow chart.

05:28 Let's look at them quickly.

05:30 The first one is the cause and effect diagram, which seeks to find the root causes of a particular defect in this case.

05:39 We can also go further with this diagram and apply a five Y's analysis to get to the root cause of the problem.

05:47 Remember, solving the root cause is what we're trying to do.

05:53 The control Chat a great way to figure out if things are in control or out of control. The important things for the exam to note are that we have a mean and expected mean of data points of something we're measuring.

06:05 The client sets up a specification limits and lower specification limits outside of those limits.

06:11 They won't pay for the product.

06:13 It's useless to them.

06:14 But we set up a control limits and lower control limits.

06:18 Three standard deviations either side of the mean.

06:21 If one of our data points is outside the specification limits we stop, there's something really wrong with our process.

06:29 If one of those data points is outside a control limit, but within a specification limit, we investigate because don't forget three standard deviations. Either side of the mean captures ninety nine per cent of the population, and therefore a data point outside of the control limits represents less than one per cent chance of occurring a low probability. So we would investigate, and the other reason we would investigate is called the rule of seven.

06:58 And this is where we get seven consecutive points above or below the mean still within our control limits.

07:05 If we get seven consecutive points, as demonstrated by the seven red data points in this diagram, that potentially means our process is out of control and we need to investigate it.

07:18 The check sheet, which is what we've developed to help us ensure that we're doing all of our quality assurance activities, carrying out those audits as we said we would. The process flowchart, particularly for our quality assurance, it just shows people graphically how our quality process works.

07:36 Also, we're decision points and feedback loops exist as well.

07:40 Pareto's law or the 80-20 rule, which says that 80 per cent of the problems come from 20 per cent of the causes.

07:47 So focus your improvement efforts on a 20 per cent of those causes for the biggest results and if we met the particular causes by frequency.

07:57 And then figure out where the 80 per cent markers we can see in this chart that improper rotation, noise and wobble those three causes account for 80 per cent of our problems.

08:08 So focus on those and you'll deal with 80 per cent of your problems.

08:14 A scatter diagram showing relationships between two independent or interdependent variables.

08:23 A histogram or bar chart where we simply map the frequency and show it in that form. And statistical sampling is another tool tool we may choose to use, as I've mentioned, you may choose to do audits on a particular sample of projects because you simply can't afford, nor have the time to audit all of your projects.

08:45 So you would use statistical sampling to choose which projects you were going to do to audit. A run chart is the last of the tools and techniques that you may find useful, which simply maps an independent variable over time on the horizontal axis.

09:03 The outputs from the project quality or perform quality assurance process. A change request, because we may find that we're not following our processes correctly as a result of those audits and which case something needs to change.

09:20 We either need to change the process or we need to change what we're doing.

09:25 Remember that change requests as an output from this process go on to be an input into the form integrated change control process where decisions are made about the change request.

09:37 We may also choose to update our project management plan, relevant project documents and, of course, organizational process assets. This is because this entire process is focused on process assets.

09:52 And if we find that our processes, our project management methodology is not working for us or not being followed, we need to update them as well.

10:04 So in summary, the perform quality assurance process has been about using the quality management plan and tools, particularly the audit to determine whether the processes, policies and procedures.

10:19 Are being used correctly and also committing to looking for opportunities for continuous improvement in our processes during the life of the project.

10:32 Thank you very much.

10:34 This has been an overview and an introduction to the perform quality assurance process and the PMBOK guide.