Question

1. Given the statement, “Project Quality Management therefore addresses both the management of the project and the product of the project (and its component parts), including the assessment and determination of how the different project management processes interact to fulfill the needs of the project and whether changes or improvements are needed to accomplish the objectives of the project”; discuss how this is applied in quality planning, performing quality assurance, and performing quality control.

2. Given the statement, "There is a cost of quality," how should a project manager plan, control and justify these costs?

Answer 1

1) Quality is one of the four pillars of project management with scope, schedule and cost. Thus it's necessary for every project to have quality management tools. The project quality management determines the quality standards that are applicable to project and devising a way to satisfy them. It addresses the project resulting product and project management of project itself. The goal of project quality management is to identify, access, control and achieve product quality using specific processes and activities. It can be achieved by 3 process:

i) Quality planning: It is the process of identifying which quality standards are relevant to project and to determine how to satisfy them. Principles involved in planning are customer satisfaction, management responsiblity, continuous improvement.

ii) Quality assurance: It refers to the maintenance of the desired level of quality in product or service by means of attention at every stage of production.

iii) Quality control: It refers to system of maintaining standards in products by testing a sample of output against the specification. It is achieved by several control tools auch as histogram, flowchart, pareto chart, check sheet, scattered diagram, fishbone diagram, control chart.

2) In process improvement process project cost or cost of quality means to quantify the total cost of quality related efforts and deficiencies. Thus cost of quality is the methodology that allows an organisation to determine the extent to which its resources are used for activities that prevents poor quality, appraise the quality of organisation's product.

Cost of quality includes:

i) Cost of Confirmance: cost of providing product as per standards. It includes preventive and appraisal cost.

ii) Cost of non confirmance: cost associated with faulty products. It includes internal and external failure cost.

All the cost mentioned above cover a specific area of project duration thus includes all types of cost required to be computed for the betterment of the project and make it efficient.

Thus cost of quality is the major tool in project management tools to achieve the specific goals.