A cost-benefit analysis can help you to figure out whether or not the project is viable. An example is if all the benefits outweigh the costs. But if the costs outweigh the benefits, then it doesn't make sense. The costs of your project may not be worth it if it has no foreseeable benefits. Consider the time and effort involved in the project versus what you will gain from it before making a decision. In addition, a CBA can help us identify where we should invest more resources.
Requirements Traceability Matrix in Project Management
In the world of project management, ensuring that all project requirements are met sounds like a daunting task. Really it is. At this point, there are some tools that project managers will use. They make their work easier as they use it. As an experienced project manager, I can say that I have witnessed firsthand the benefits that requirements traceability matrix brings to the table.
Project Scope Statement with Examples
A scope statement defines the details and features of the project's scope, what was assumed or desired when initiating the project, and how the project should be completed. Your project scope statement serves as a guide, shows the path for stakeholders and team members to complete your project with precision. As they navigate through the project's journey, this invaluable reference becomes a compass, ensuring everyone stays on track and aligned with the grand vision. Embracing this, the project goes smoothly towards success, leaving no room for ambiguity or misdirection.
Project Scope Statement with Examples
A scope statement defines the details and features of the project's scope, what was assumed or desired when initiating the project, and how the project should be completed. Stakeholders and team members will use your project scope statement as a reference to accurately measure the success of your project.
Process Groups in the PMP Exam
Each type of work you need to complete in real life has its own characteristics and needs time to be completed. The process groups of project management treat different kinds of work. As with project management, best practices in the industry dictate that these processes are categorized under predetermined groups.
Business Documents in Project Management
There are two business documents that are crucial to project management endeavor, business case and benefits management plan. These two documents are kept separately from the program framework and don't combine with project management and its individual plan components.
Quality Management Knowledge Area
Quality management involves the processes and activities necessary to ensure that a project meets the requirements and expectations of all stakeholders with respect to quality. I personally think that it is one of the most important knowledge areas in project management. Because, quality is always something that we care about.
Control Quality Process in the PMP Exam
Processes should be controlled to guarantee the product meets quality standards and requirements. The control quality process is conducted according to the way determined in the quality management plan and implementing it makes sure defects in the product are eliminated before the product reaches the customer, causing larger workloads, but ensuring that errors are detected before delivery, and saving time, money, and resources.
Activities like quality control happen in order to discover why certain products do not meet the appropriate quality requirements and potential corrective and preventative measures are put into place to assure that this does not happen again in the future. Any deliveries made within the project are inspected, verified deliveries will be disclosed as the process advances. These verified deliveries are assessed in the validate scope process to secure the customer's satisfaction.
Control quality is an aspect of;
Under PMBOK 7, essential components of the process are outlined in the following project performance domains;
Comments:
1- Dell:
Wow, what a compelling post. The concept of process control to guarantee top-notch product quality is like orchestrating a symphony of excellence. I couldn't agree more with the idea of implementing quality management plans to nip defects in the bud, sparing customers from any dissatisfaction and making the team's efforts truly harmonious.
I'm left curious about the ingenious strategies behind quality control activities and how they transform flawed products into flawless masterpieces. Have you ever encountered a real life project where control quality played a pivotal role in delivering outstanding results? I'd love to hear more about your experiences and any unique approaches you've witnessed in this process. Let's keep the creative discussion going.
Manage Quality Process
Now we're getting into the management section of quality, and we're managing the quality of the deliverables that we're creating. So as you can see, we've got project quality management as our knowledge area and we're in the executing project process group. So we're starting to create those deliverables and as we're creating those deliverables, we're needing to manage the quality of those deliverables to make sure they fit for purpose.
Manage quality is the process of translating the quality management plan, so the process of what we decided to do, how we were going to manage quality, and we're translating that into executable quality activities like testing, for example, that incorporate the organization's quality policies into the project. So basically, how are we making sure that our item is fit for purpose? What is the process and making sure that matches up with our quality management plan that we agreed on in the first place?
The key benefits of this process are that it increases the probability of meeting the quality objectives because we're making sure that they're correct, we're testing them to make sure they're right, as well as identifying ineffective processes that we might have and causes of poor quality as we're delivering those items for our project. Inputs, tools, and techniques and outputs that we'll see as part of managing quality. The project management plan, project documents, and organizational process assets.
Tools and techniques we'll see are data gathering, so checklists, data analysis, so there might be different alternatives that we need to look at, decision-making data representations, so we might need to do quality charts, Ishikawa diagrams, for example, cause and effect diagrams, audits, designing for a certain characteristic, in other words, problem-solving and quality improvement methods. Outputs that we'll see are our quality reports, so how did our testing or quality management activities go, testing and evaluation documents, what was tested, how do they perform, any change requests if we find defects or if we need to make a change, and project management plan updates and project documents updates.
As you can see, managing quality will have an input into performing integrated change control, the cause we might need to make change requests if we find a defect and we need to make a change to our deliverable or to our scope, the project management plan as well and project documents they'll all have a managed quality will have an input into all of those items. Here's an overview for managing quality.
Manage quality involves activities such as failure analysis, design of experiments, and quality improvement. So we're wanting to improve our process over time and this is where Agile will come into play and our retrospectives, how did our team go, what can we improve, how can we improve our way of work. Managing quality is considered the work of everyone in the team, the project manager, the project team, project sponsor, and management of the performing organization, and even the customer themselves.
Let's look at the inputs in more detail. The project management plan, of course, but mostly the quality management plan, in other words, what is the process we agreed for how we're going to check that these deliverables are fit for purpose. Is it testing? Are we going to give it to our customers to play with and use and then put that feedback into it? Are we going to build error-proofing into the deliverable itself? What is that process and how do we abide by that?
Project documents, so lessons learned from other projects, quality control measurements, quality metrics that we're going to use, what is the definition of good quality for our item and the risk report, are there any risks that we need to be aware of and how does that feed into the quality of our item or the deliverable itself?
Organizational process assets, so we might have an organizational quality management system already existing, can we use that? We might have existing quality templates in the organization that you're working in, results from previous audits, and audits are more about the process, so did a previous project go through the correct process, was the order a good outcome? Then maybe we can copy that or maybe it was a bad outcome and maybe we can be warned against doing that in the future, lessons learned repository with information from similar projects, tools, checklists, and techniques that will use our data gathering, specifically checklists, so maybe for our quality or testing we have, we want it to match this item, meet this criteria, this criteria, this criteria, and someone going through that testing process might say, "Yes, it meets that criteria. Yes, it meets that criteria. No, it doesn't meet that criteria. Yes, it meets that one." That is our checklist. It's an easy way to see what should be right and if it's wrong, then we can clearly see that as well.
Data analysis, data analysis, so we might need to look at different alternatives, maybe different alternative solutions to things that go wrong or different alternatives for our scope if we're needing to change it, document analysis, process analysis, is the process that we're going through correct, is the process that we're delivering as part of the project correct as well, and root cause analysis to any problems that come about, decision-making will definitely be needed and this includes multi-criteria decision analysis that we've seen many, many times. Just briefly, you've got the matrix of items or options up the top and criteria down the side and we can say option one meets all of those criteria and that's the one we want to go with.
Data representation might include all of these different quality diagrams, affinity diagrams, so there are lots of different ideas or options and but which ones are the same, so which ones are have an affinity with each other, maybe we can group them in that way, cause and effect diagrams, where we've got the problem up at the head of our fishbone diagram or Ishikawa diagram and different options for brainstorming causes to that particular problem, maybe it's people, maybe it's the process, maybe it's information or cyst, you can put many different options there, flowcharts of the process, histograms for measuring, maybe there's a lot of defects happening in this particular area but not at these areas here, so that's a good way to measure it and of course matrix diagrams and scatter plots, scatter plots on a matrix as well where we've got an X or Y axis and all of the different measures come in at different dots but maybe there's a like a lot of dots happening around here so it's low on this scale, low on this scale and that's the bulk of where our measures are coming in at and maybe that's a good thing or maybe if we're getting high, you know, maybe that's a bad thing or vice versa but that's how we represent using a scatter plot. Audits will be a part of our tools and techniques and so audits just look at the process, how are we actually delivering this project and not necessarily the deliverables themselves so audits are usually done by an external party to the project or even sometimes to the organization and they'll come in and say are you doing things correctly, are you meeting the right might write requirements for going through the right process so are you doing the right documents, are you meeting the regulations that need to be done, all of those sorts of things. Designing for X and X could be anything, designing so what are we designing for.
We designing our product for reliability, are we designing it for manufacturing, are we designing it for cost, do we want a low-cost product, are we designing it for usability, do we want a really usable item, are we designing it for safety, or are we designing it for quality. Using design for X might result in cost reduction, quality improvement, better performance, or even customer satisfaction depending on what you are designing for. Problem-solving will be required as well.
We might need if we come across a defect when we're doing our quality inspections then we might need to identify the problem, define the problem, identify the root cause, why is this happening, generating possible solutions and choosing the best solution, and then verifying that that solution worked once we have implemented it.
That's all part of problem-solving if we do come across things that are wrong. Quality improvement methods will be required as well. They might come from Six Sigma, so quality audits or problem-solving in the managed quality process. We might have the plan-do-check-act or Six Sigma, they're two of the most common quality improvement tools.
Plan-do-check-act is your Deming model from Lean usually but basically, we're planning what we're doing then we're doing it and we're checking it and once we've checked it we're feeding that back into a new plan so it's sort of iterative in that way we're improving over time and Six Sigma is your to-make model where we're designing, measuring, analyzing, improving, and finally controlling the item that we're improving as well.
Quality reports will be required as well so they could be graphical, numerical, or qualitative basically we want to give an output that's this is part of our output we want to report on how the quality is going maybe there was 80% success or pass rate and that's a good thing and we can put that into a chart and we can show that to the project sponsor or executives.
Test evaluation documents so testing inputs, how did the testing actually go their inputs into the control quality process because if we're testing and we can use our checklists for testing as well it's all connected so we got some of these rights some of these wrong but now maybe we need to control that quality because this one needs to be fixed so we need to improve that over time and that's why it feeds into our control quality process.
Change requests might be needed for that very reason if we're needing to make a change to that item that we got wrong then maybe we need to make a change and that goes through our perform integrated change control process that we saw way back at the beginning in the chapter four in project integration management.
Project management plan updates updates as well we might need to update our quality management plan if we're updating the process that we're going through any of the scope items if they need to have a change any scheduled items if the schedule has changed based on our testing and the cost baseline if we need to add costs for prevention or failure costs that have come about.
Project document updates as well we'll have the risk register any risks that need to be updated lessons learned that we've learned and of course any issues that come about. And just an important note here risks are called out before they happen but once they have happened then they turn into an issue and we might need to raise that issue and work through it and maybe that issue results in a change request that goes through our change Control Board to the project sponsor so sometimes that's the way it will go not every risk results in an issue and not every issue results in a change but if something happens that is not what we wanted or not what we expected then we do need to just log that issue in the issue log and those are all the details of manage quality from the project management.
Value Principle in the PMP Exam
If you work in a results-driven environment, you have to pay close attention to project management characteristics, since the goal is to achieve specified requirements rather than to make particular products.
What is a Risk Owner in Project Management
Depending on the project's scope and scale, the risk owner has full responsibility for discovering, watching over uncertainty, and mitigating possible risks, as well as developing and implementing risk management plans.