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Quality Planning Standards and Implementation
Project Management · Chapter 3: Building a Comprehensive Project PlanSection 3.6 · lesson 20 of 7313 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
How to define, measure, and budget for quality before work begins.
- Distinguish conformance to requirements from fitness for use, and quality from grade
- Convert stakeholder expectations into measurable quality requirements and name the standards that apply
- Calculate the cost of quality across prevention, appraisal, internal failure, and external failure
- Write a quality metric with an operational definition covering what, how, tolerance, and frequency
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Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,656 words). Read along, or search it.
Opening Question
Study Rooms Built to Drawing Yet Stuffy
A contractor fits out six glass-and-timber study rooms in a public library. Every frame and fitting matches the drawings exactly. Then, on a warm afternoon, the closed rooms are too stuffy to sit in for an hour. Nobody had written down a ventilation requirement. So, is that quality, or not? The answer depends on which definition of quality you use, and a quality plan needs both.
Two Definitions
Conformance to Requirements and Fitness for Use
In project management, quality is the degree to which a deliverable does what it's supposed to do. Two long-standing definitions capture that. Conformance to requirements: a deliverable has quality when it matches what was written for it. The contract says each frame is 2,400 millimeters tall, give or take 3. A frame of 2,401 conforms. One of 2,410 doesn't, however good it looks. Fitness for use: a deliverable has quality when it serves the purpose its users need, written down or not. The stuffy rooms conform, and still aren't fit for use. Conformance can be checked objectively, and agreed in a contract. Fitness for use reminds you that requirements are an imperfect description of a need. This course uses both: conformance to make checking possible, and fitness for use to test whether the requirements are the right ones.
Quality Versus Grade
High Quality at a Low Grade
Quality is also different from grade. Grade is the category of deliverables with the same basic purpose, but different features. A single-speed commuter bike is a lower grade than one with 21 gears and suspension. If its welds hold and its brakes stop it within spec, it's high quality at a low grade. If the fancy bike's fork works loose in a week, it's low quality at a high grade. Or a festival program: a plain leaflet with every time correct beats a glossy 24-page booklet with misprinted times, for the visitors' real need. Two separate questions, then. What grade is needed? That comes from the need and the budget, and it can legitimately be low. How much quality at that grade? Almost always, high.
Requirements
Turning Expectations Into Checkable Numbers
Where do quality requirements come from? Mostly from the scope statement, hidden in its adjectives, and from stakeholders: staff, the sponsor, readers, the electrical inspector. Raw expectations can't be inspected. So planning turns each one into something checkable. Quiet becomes: with the door closed and a normal conversation outside, a sound meter inside reads no more than 45 decibels. Easy to clean becomes: a trained cleaner wipes every interior surface of a room in under 12 minutes. Durable becomes: the door hinge survives 5,000 open-and-close cycles on a test rig without loosening. Numbers also expose stakeholder conflicts early. If the sponsor wants the cheapest hinge and the library wants five thousand cycles, that's negotiated now, not disputed at handover.
Standards
Company, Industry, and Regulatory Standards
A quality plan also names the standards that apply. A standard is a documented rule or specification, so different parties get consistent results. A company standard is set by one organization for its own work, like measuring every timber frame on arrival. It binds only that organization. An industry standard is developed by a trade body or standards organization for general use. Usually voluntary, but a contract can make it mandatory. A regulatory standard is set by government, with the force of law. In the US, federal, state and local rules apply depending on the deliverable and the place. The project manager doesn't decide alone which regulations apply. Where it matters legally, counsel or the responsible authority confirms it.
ISO Family
ISO 9000 Vocabulary and ISO 9001 Requirements
One widely used family is ISO 9000, from the International Organization for Standardization, an independent body whose members are national standards organizations. ISO 9000 sets out fundamentals and vocabulary: shared principles, and agreed meanings of terms like quality and requirement. ISO 9001 sets out requirements for a quality management system: the policies, processes and responsibilities an organization uses to direct its quality. An independent certification body can assess an organization against ISO 9001, and if it passes, the organization holds a certificate. But a standard is a framework for process, not a guarantee of any one deliverable. A certified firm can still build the wrong thing from the wrong requirements.
Worked Example
Four Categories of the Cost of Quality
Quality also has a price tag. The cost of quality is all the money spent to prevent defects, find them, and deal with them, where a defect is anything that fails a requirement. Prevention is spent before the work, to stop defects: training crews in the fitting method, reviewing drawings before building. Appraisal is spent to measure and inspect, so defects are found: inspecting parts on delivery, testing finished rooms. Internal failure is spent on defects found before the customer gets the deliverable: a mis-cut panel scrapped, a failed test repeated. External failure is spent on defects found after: warranty call-outs, a replaced door, handling a complaint. Prevention plus appraisal is the cost of conformance. The two failure categories are the cost of nonconformance. And the later a defect is found, the more it tends to cost: a tendency, not a law. Now the arithmetic, with illustrative figures. Under the first plan: prevention 4,000, appraisal 6,000, internal failure 10,000, external failure 20,000. Total cost of quality: 40,000. Shares: 10, 15, 25 and 50 percent. So conformance is 25 percent, and nonconformance a full 75. The team proposes 5,000 more on prevention: a drawing check and extra training, so prevention becomes 9,000. It assumes appraisal falls to 5,000, internal failure to 6,000, and external failure to 8,000. The new total is 28,000, split fifty-fifty. Failure falls by 16,000, appraisal by 1,000, prevention rises by 5,000: a net saving of 12,000. Two cautions. Those reductions are assumptions, not something a project can know in advance. And a shift in shares isn't a saving, so read the totals with the shares.
Debate
How Far to Push Prevention Spending
How far to push prevention is disputed. One view: spend until the last dollar of prevention saves no more than a dollar of failure, because perfect prevention is neither affordable nor needed. The other: failure costs are usually undercounted. Lost future work, reputation and complaint-handling time rarely reach the accounts, and where failure can injure people, money against money is the wrong test. How large the hidden costs are is empirical. Whether harm to people should ever be traded against cost is a question of values.
Quick Check
Calibrating the Sound Meter
Quick check. The team pays a lab to calibrate its sound meter. Which category of quality cost is that? Pause, and decide. Appraisal. Calibration keeps the measuring honest, so it belongs with inspecting and testing: money spent to find defects. It doesn't stop a defect from being made, so it isn't prevention, and nothing has failed yet, so it isn't a failure cost.
Quality Management Plan
Objectives, Roles, Metrics, and Reporting
All of this lands in the quality management plan: how the project will meet its quality requirements. It states measurable quality objectives, and names the applicable standards: company, industry and regulatory. It assigns roles: a quality lead who owns the plan, inspectors who check, and the sponsor who receives reports. It defines metrics with targets, gives inspectors checklists, and schedules the deeper audits and tests. And it says what quality information goes to whom, and how often.
Quality Metrics
Operational Definitions and Defects per Unit
A quality metric is a measurable characteristic, with a target. It's only useful with an operational definition: exactly what's measured and how, so two people get the same result. A weak metric: the finish on the frames should look good. No measure, method, limit or schedule. Two inspectors will disagree. A strong one states four things. What: paint runs, chips and bare patches longer than 2 millimeters. How: every visible face, inspected from 1 meter, under standard workshop light, counted on a checklist. Tolerance: an average of no more than 1 defect per frame. Frequency: 10 frames sampled from each delivery. Defects per unit is defects counted, divided by units inspected. Seven defects in 10 frames is 0.7: within tolerance. Fourteen in 10 is 1.4, which breaks the tolerance. And the plan already says what happens then: inspect every frame in that delivery, and notify the supplier.
Quick Check
Twelve Defects in Eight Frames
Quick check. The next delivery is sampled smaller: an inspector finds 12 defects in 8 frames. Same tolerance, an average of at most 1 per frame. Within tolerance, or over? Pause, and decide. Over. Twelve divided by eight is one and a half defects per frame, above the limit of one. So the plan's response kicks in: inspect every frame in the delivery, and tell the supplier. Counting twelve in a smaller sample doesn't make the delivery better.
Planned Checks
Checklists, Tests, and Audits per Deliverable
Each planned check is tied to a deliverable in the work breakdown structure, so no deliverable goes unchecked. A checklist is a fixed list an inspector ticks off, repeatable and recorded. Timber frames: height and width within 3 millimeters, on delivery. A test exercises a deliverable to see if it performs. Wiring gets a continuity and safety test, plus a local inspection where required, before walls close. Ventilation gets an airflow reading in each closed room, which closes the gap from the stuffy afternoon. An audit is an independent review of whether the work follows the planned process. In week three, one checks that crews follow the written fitting method. The finished room gets the sound reading, hinge cycles and cleaning trial before handover, and results go to the sponsor, with anything out of tolerance flagged.
Looking Ahead
Quality Assurance and Quality Control
Carrying out these checks isn't planning. Quality assurance checks that the planned processes are being followed. Quality control inspects and tests results against requirements. Both happen during execution, later in the course, using the metrics defined here. And the study rooms? With fitness for use asking the question, ventilation became a measured requirement, so the next set of rooms can conform and be fit for use.
Key Takeaways
Conformance, Grade, Cost, and Metrics
To recap. Check conformance to requirements, and use fitness for use to test the requirements themselves. Grade is a choice of features. Quality at that grade should be high. Cost of quality has four categories: prevention and appraisal for conformance, internal and external failure for nonconformance. And every metric needs an operational definition: what, how, tolerance and frequency.
About Project Management at UPI Study
Project Management (Business 230) is a self-paced online course of 73 video lessons in 12 chapters, from starting and defining a project to planning, budgets, scheduling tools, proposals, contracts, execution, monitoring, closure, teams and certification. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.
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