Plan Quality Management

00:01 Hello and welcome.

00:02 This module will cover the planned quality management process of the PMBOK guide. It's moderately important for the exam, this particular process, though, focuses on the development of the quality management plan. So the difficulty is low and so is the memorization, because most of the concepts, even though some of them may be new, are easy to remember. The particular domain task that the plan quality management process helps us to understand more is planning Task eight, which says develop the quality management plan and define the quality standards for the project and its products based on the project scope, risks and requirements in order to prevent the occurrence of defects and control the cost of quality.

00:57 So that's our goal to produce the quality management plan, which allows us to do all of that. The key theme of this process is the development of our quality management plan.

01:09 And as we know, we need a plan to guide our doing or executing activities. We always start with a plan, and our quality management plan is going to be the plan that guides our quality assurance and our quality control activities.

01:28 Let's start with the possible inputs that you may find useful in the development of your quality management plan.

01:35 The first one is the Project Management Plan and all of its subsidiary plans, baselines and documents.

01:43 This is because quality affects all aspects of our project, not just the product being delivered, but also all the processes.

01:52 And therefore we should take into consideration all the other aspects of the project if they're relevant.

02:00 Another input that we may find useful is to stakeholder register.

02:05 At first glance, you may be asking why the stakeholder register.

02:09 But think about it, it's our stakeholders and their expectations of quality that we need to take into account in the development of our quality management plan.

02:20 The stakeholder register is going to contain information about our stakeholders and their particular interest in our project, and we should use the stakeholder register to make contact with them to find out what their quality expectations are of the project so we can capture that in our own particular quality management plan.

02:40 We may also want our risk register whatever iteration of it that we're at, because the risk register may highlight issues around quality and risks around poor quality and how it could impact our project, our product or even our reputation.

02:57 So we need the risk register and examine it for any risks around quality. We'll also want the requirements, documentation, the requirements, documentation, and remember, this was an output from the collect requirements process from the Project Scope Management Knowledge Area, the requirements documentation sets out all of our project requirements. And essentially, what we're going to be doing with quality management is checking whether we've delivered those requirements or not.

03:27 So having access to the requirements documentation is a fairly useful input in the development of our own particular quality management plan.

03:37 There may be some enterprise environmental factors, particularly those relating to government legislation and expectations around quality standards for your work that you are doing.

03:49 You may also have some organizational process assets.

03:52 Your project management methodology or parts of it that specifically rate relate to project quality.

04:00 But before we go any further onto the tools and techniques.

04:03 I just want to take you through some of the basic foundational concepts of quality management that you're going to need to know for the exam that you may not be fully aware of now. First up, let's start by actually defining what we mean by the word quality.

04:20 Quality doesn't mean good or bad.

04:23 The actual definition of quality says quality is the management of the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements.

04:34 So there's two things there characteristics and requirements.

04:40 Now we have our requirements in the form of requirements, documentation, so part of our quality management workers to go and observe and collect certain characteristics.

04:49 And if those characteristics of either process or product meet our requirements, that's what quality is.

04:58 Another key foundational concept of quality management.

05:03 Is that prevention is better than inspection? We tried to prevent errors rather than find them by inspecting things after they've occurred, because, generally speaking, it costs more to fix an error than to prevent one.

05:21 So for the purposes of the exam, focus on that it's generally better to prevent errors than to fine them with inspection.

05:31 Some more foundational terms you'll need to be aware of.

05:34 Quality and grade.

05:37 They're not the same thing some people think they are.

05:41 Grade refers to the amount of features a product has.

05:46 So low grade is fine, low quality is not.

05:50 There are many companies out there that distinguish products by grade with different brands. Think of Sony and Sanyo.

05:58 They produce the same quality product, but the brands differentiate the grade or the features that each one has.

06:05 There's a number of car companies, Toyota and Lexus brands.

06:09 They are the same quality, but the grade in each of the cars is different.

06:14 So grade is the amount of features a product has.

06:18 Quality is whether the characteristics meet requirements.

06:22 So for the purposes of the exam, if you get a question saying you're producing a product of low grade, what should you do? Well, the answer is nothing, if that's what you were asked to produce.

06:33 If you're producing at something of low quality, you'll need to justify why.

06:40 Here's another couple of terms that you will need to know for the exam precision and accuracy. We've got this diagram of a bullseye target to show you what we mean. The green dots that precise.

06:55 The tightly clustered around a particular area.

06:58 That's what precision means, the results of your observation are tightly clustered around a particular mean point.

07:06 But they're not very accurate because they're nowhere near the middle of that bull's eye.

07:10 The red dots, on the other hand, are both precise and accurate. They're precise because they're tightly clustered, and they're accurate because they're near the bullseye of the target.

07:23 You may want to think about what a distribution that was accurate and not precise looks like, I'll leave you to think about that one.

07:34 Here are some other basic concepts of modern quality management that you will need to know. First up, William Edward Dimming has provided a lot of modern quality management, and the profession of project management has taken a lot of quality management.

07:51 You'll remember the Shewhart and Deming plan do check act cycle, which forms the basis of planning, executing and monitoring and controlling.

08:01 So if you want to find out more about modern quality management, read some of Demings work, and he gave us either directly or directly influenced the following concepts which you'll need to know about for the exam.

08:14 The first up is total quality management.

08:18 Now, total quality management is an approach where everybody in the organization is committed to quality all of the time.

08:26 Now, this was developed in response to some people who saw quality management as something that the workers did while they were employing it, and management really didn't need to think about it.

08:38 Total quality management means it's a commitment from everybody in the organization to focus on quality at all times.

08:47 You may have heard of or even be accredited with ISO nine thousand or ISO nine thousand one.

08:54 These are international standards on quality, particularly focused on quality assurance and the correctness of the processes that you use.

09:05 Another basic quality concept is the concept of Six Sigma.

09:09 You may even be certified as a Six Sigma Green Belt or black belt.

09:14 Now Six Sigma is six standard deviations and six standard deviations either side of the mean.

09:22 Attempts to capture 99.99 per cent of the population, so a commitment to a Six Sigma approach is to try and eliminate all errors and go for total quality all of the time.

09:37 And you'll be pleased to know that the manufacturers of medical devices aim for Six Sigma quality.

09:45 In other word that you'll need to know for the exam as Kaizen, it's a Japanese word which means continuous improvement, and it's a commitment to ongoing improvements in your quality management approach, not just treating quality as a one off, but looking for opportunities throughout the whole life of your project to improve quality throughout the life of the project.

10:10 A final term that you'll need to know is just in time.

10:14 Now you may be thinking, you know, just in time as an inventory or procurement method for making sure that you have the goods you need to do your manufacturing in your building just in time to use them.

10:28 And yes, accountants love it because it reduces the amount of stock housed and warehouses.

10:35 But a commitment to just in time is also a commitment to high quality.

10:40 Because if you don't have stock sitting in warehouses that you can go and get, if you make a mistake, you must have good quality.

10:49 So just in time can also be a quality management tool or technique as well.

10:57 Let's move on to the tools and techniques, though, that we can use in the development of our quality management plan.

11:04 The first is cost benefit analysis now.

11:09 Tackling quality costs.

11:11 It costs time. It costs money.

11:13 The cost benefit so, you need to ensure that the benefits being derived from your quality management efforts, including your planning activities, outweigh the costs.

11:27 If they don't, you might need to question why you're doing them.

11:31 But in doing so, you'll also need to examine the cost of quality.

11:35 This is the decision that all projects and project managers need to consider.

11:41 If you commit to cost of quality, you'll have a quality product, you'll have a quality reputation and you probably have a successful project.

11:52 Sometimes project managers will be pressured to lower the cost of their project by reducing the quality of what they're producing.

12:01 This is really a false economy.

12:04 Yes, the project costs are lower, but you haven't got rid of those costs. All you've done is transferred them to other points in the product life cycle, and the cost of low quality or cost of poor quality will manifest again in the form of higher maintenance or operating costs.

12:25 So, yes, reducing the cost of quality on your project will reduce the cost of your project, but it's simply transfers that cost to other points in the product life cycle.

12:39 Now, the seven basic quality tools, I'm going to show you an example of each of them. These were developed by Ishikawa, who is a contemporary of dimming. And what he did was observed that Mr.

12:54 Deming coming from a statistical background presented a lot of quality information and statistics and charts, which to the average person were not easy to interpret.

13:07 So he came up with seven diagrams to help us understand quality management concepts.

13:15 And I'll take you through those in a moment.

13:17 The next total technique we're going to look at is benchmarking now.

13:21 Benchmarking is really useful in the development of your quality management plan, where you can compare your quality management efforts and plan to another project you've recently committed to or one outside of your organization or even benchmark against other industry standards. Some more tools and techniques that you may find useful design of experiments.

13:47 It's important during the planning stages of quality management activities to give consideration to the types of experiments you're going to conduct to get the information you need about quality on your project.

14:01 The very design of experiments can influence the results you get. So take care with designing your experiments to make sure that the results and the data you are getting from them are actually valid.

14:16 Another total technique, statistical sampling, and this is where you will use this in an instance where your population size is simply too large. Maybe it's lines of computer code and there's millions of them.

14:31 You can't test every line, so you choose a particular portion of the code to sample and look for quality or errors in it.

14:40 There are some additional quality planning tools referred to in the PMBOK guide.

14:45 Now, these generally refer to another seven diagrams.

14:51 One of Mr. Ishikawa, his contemporaries came out with an additional seven diagrams and will look at those in another module.

15:00 A final tall technique that you could use is, of course, meetings, and this is where you bring together your experts, your stakeholders, your project team members, and you get them to consider your quality management plan and give input to it.

15:17 Let's take a closer look at Ishikawa seven quality tools, and remember they are all diagrams which present what could be complex statistical information in an easy to understand manner.

15:32 We're going to have a look at the cause and effect fishbone or Ishikawa diagram that actually does have three names cause and effect Fishbone or Ishikawa diagram. We're going to have a look at control charts, check sheets, scatter diagrams, perito diagrams, histograms and flow charts. So take you through examples of each of those for the exam.

15:56 You'll need to know each of these.

15:59 The first one, the cause and effect Ishikawa or Fishbone diagram is a way to determine what the actual causes of a problem may be.

16:12 Now, in this instance, we've highlighted a major defect.

16:18 And we're undertaking an exercise to look at all of the potential causes, not just stopping it one cause.

16:26 And in this instance, whatever this defect is, we've determined that the potential causes. Well, time the machine, the method we're using, the materials we're using, the energy being used to produce it, the measurements we made or didn't make the personnel doing the work or the environment in which it's been done are all potential causes.

16:48 Our goal with the cause and effect diagram is actually to get to the root cause of the problem or problems and solve those.

16:56 So one of the other techniques we can use on top of the cause and effect Ishikawa or Fishbone diagram is called five whys.

17:05 Why as in why is there a problem? And Five Whys is not stopping at the first cause, but asking Why is time a problem and then go back sort of like a three year old child asking you why the sky is blue? And they continue to ask why every time you give an answer.

17:26 So keep that in mind for the exam to.

17:30 Here's an example of a control chart now pay particular attention to this chart, as is always at least one question in the exam about it.

17:38 And there's a lot of information contained in this chart.

17:41 First up, we have an expected mean.

17:44 And that is represented by the mean sign.

17:48 We also have upper specification limits and lower specification limits, which the client sits.

17:55 Now between those specification limits, the client will accept and pay for the product that we're making outside of those specification limits.

18:04 They won't. They don't want that product.

18:06 It's faulty in their eyes.

18:09 So what we do is we set some upper control limits and some lower control limits. We set them three standard deviations.

18:18 Either side of the mean.

18:20 So the upper control limit is three standard deviations above the mean.

18:24 The lower control limit is three standard deviations below the mean.

18:29 Obviously, using three standard deviations, either side of the mean, we expect to capture ninety nine per cent of our population within that range.

18:39 So if one of those data points were collecting comes outside the control limits.

18:47 We need to investigate, because that's highly unlikely.

18:51 Less than one per cent chance of that actually happening, and it could indicate that our process is about to go out of control.

18:59 So remember, outside the specification limits stop.

19:03 Something's very wrong with your process.

19:05 Client won't pay for it outside of the control limit, but inside the specification limit, you need to investigate, as that's highly unlikely. There's also one other situation where you should investigate, and that's called the rule of seven.

19:21 You'll notice here on the diagram seven consecutive points and read all below our mean still within our control limits, though.

19:32 Now, it's highly unlikely that you would get seven consecutive points either side of a mean, it's not quite the same as but it's a good example of saying if I gave you a coin and asked you to toss it and you got seven heads in a row, you might begin to suspect that the coin was weighted. So here what we're looking for is a problem, a potential problem.

19:58 So if we see seven consecutive points, either side of the mean, we should investigate it as well, and that's called the rule of seven.

20:09 This is a simple check sheet, which helps us ensure that we're doing all of the quality management activities, so we'll use these and we'll be able to record what we've done, what the results were as well.

20:23 This is an example of a flow chart.

20:25 What we've done here is documented our quality process for the development of artwork. And we take people through the steps so they can see graphically how we move through the process and also the feedback loops based on decision points that happen so we can use a process flowchart to make quality management activities as well.

20:49 Pareto or Pareto's law, Will Pareto was a 17th century Venetian economist in Italy who was the first person to observe and document that at that point twenty per cent of the population in Italy owned 80 per cent of the land.

21:07 Now, since then, particularly in the 1950s, with Joseph Duran, the management consultant, we've coined the term Pareto's law, which basically means 20 per cent of our issues are caused by 80 per cent of the problems or the 80 20 rule.

21:24 So with Pareto's law, we need to find the 80 percent of the problems that come from 20 per cent of the causes, and we need to focus our improvement efforts just on those 20 per cent..

21:36 It's the biggest bang for Buck.

21:38 By focusing on that 20 per cent, you'll solve 80 per cent of your problems so we can use a Pareto chart to find out what our 80 per cent is. So let's take a look at this one here.

21:52 We've got some problems with car wheels and noises being generated from them, and over time with the problems that we've seen, we've tracked the frequency of them and we've got improper rotation, noise wobble, the pressure of the tyres, actual or caulking, case wobbles and other things all by frequency. So we can see the greatest reason for noise is improper rotation. Followed by an indeterminate noise.

22:21 But now, if we come across to the right hand axis, which is the cumulative total, which is that curve.

22:29 And if we go up to 80 per cent, just above the 75 per cent come across will find that improper rotation, noise and wobble, those three causes account for 80 per cent of our problems.

22:43 So let's focus on those.

22:45 That's the value of a perito diagram.

22:48 A scatter diagram? Well, it maps two variables.

22:52 And in this one, you can see that there's a strong correlation between these two variables. This is a histogram or bar chart, which simply shows the frequency of problems and a run chart. We're on a run chart.

23:08 The variable along the horizontal axis is usually time.

23:13 The x axis is whatever we want it to be.

23:16 This time it's weight in grams and it just maps the recording of those variables over time.

23:23 Statistical sampling, I've mentioned it already, but it's a useful tool to have at your disposal for quality management planning if you decide to use it because it enables you to sample a small part of a large population.

23:38 And extrapolate from that results to the entire population, and it's a very useful technique to use when the entire population is far too large and would cost too much to test or win, destructive testing is involved.

23:55 The outputs we get from the plan quality management process are, of course, our quality management plan and this is the plan that we're going to use to guide our quality assurance and air quality control activities.

24:09 We may also generate some change requests that need to go back into other parts of the project once we've assessed the cost of quality and the impact of pursuing high levels of quality.

24:21 We'll also develop some quality metrics.

24:23 These are the numbers by which we're going to measure quality and our tolerances for quality. We'll have our quality checklists all developed, showing how we're going to measure quality, making sure that people can watch what they need to do and check off that they've done it.

24:40 And as a result of this, we may also choose to update some project documents with our own commitment to continuous improvement.

24:49 But before we go any further, I just want to stop for a moment and focus on configuration management. There's generally at least one question.

24:58 Often two or three in the exam about configuration management.

25:02 And this is the best place to talk about it during quality management, because it really is a total technique to deal with quality on a project.

25:11 Now configuration management is your system or systems of tracking, controlling, surveilling or watching any part of your project. And it's not one System..

25:22 It's multiple systems and there's plenty of examples of it, some of which you already have in the projects that you're using.

25:30 So, for example, those numbers we put on each of our WBS nodes that map back to our cost accounting system.

25:37 That's an example of configuration management.

25:41 Which version of software are you currently viewing this on? Well, software version control.

25:46 Whether it's version one, version eight point four, version fifteen point one, that's a version of configuration management as well cost accounting codes in your general ledger, giving every element of your project its own cost accounting code.

26:00 That's an example of configuration management parts numbering to ensure that you're using the right part.

26:06 That's an example of configuration management as well.

26:10 The numbers you give each of the changes and your change register, that's an example as well and also document control.

26:19 You may put confidential draft for construction for release onto your documents and make sure that perhaps you stamp very clearly superseded or out-of-date on old documents.

26:32 Another example of configuration management.

26:35 So they're all examples of configuration management, so remember that for the exam, it's a way to track and surveil any aspect of your project.

26:44 And yes, you can have a configuration management plan as part of your project management plan as well.

26:51 So in summary, the plan quality management process has been focused on the development of a quality management plan, which were then going to use to guide our quality assurance and quality control activities.

27:06 Thank you very much. This has been an overview of the planned quality management process and the PMBOK guide.