Information Technology Project Management – Week #7 Lecture

What Is Project Quality?

Experts measure a project’s quality based on the conformance to requirements of the project’s products or services, or fitness for use. Quality suggests that a project’s methods and deliverables meet written specifications, or a projects’ delivered product can be used as it was intended. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), defines quality as, “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements.”

What Is Project Quality Management?

Project quality management ensures that the project outcome satisfies the business goals and other purposes for which the project was undertaken. Project quality management includes three processes planning quality management, performing quality assurance, and performing quality control. Planning quality management involves identifying standards relevant to the project, defining how to meet the standards, and determining how to measure whether the standards were achieved. Performing quality assurance involves evaluating the overall project performance periodically to ensure the project satisfies quality standards. Performing quality control entails monitoring project results to ensure compliance with quality standards.

Figure 1 Project Quality Management Summary (Schwalbe, 2015)

Planning Quality

Planning quality management prevents defects by setting quality standards, procedures to achieve the standards and methods to verify that the standards were achieved. Quality planning requires anticipation of situations that might impact quality and preparing ways to address them. Defects are prevented by selecting proper materials, training and indoctrinating people in quality, and planning processes that ensure the expected outcome. There are aspects of a project scope that affects quality. Clarity of the project scope and requirements is achieved between the customer and project team to ensure the quality of the product or service created. Scope aspects, of IT projects, that influence quality, are functionality, features, system outputs, system performance, system reliability, and system maintainability.

Who’s Responsible for the Quality
of Projects?

Ultimately, project managers are responsible for project quality management. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) www.iso.org, and I triple E (IEEE) at www.ieee.org, are organizations that project managers and teams can reference for quality information.

Performing Quality Assurance

Quality assurance consists of all the undertakings related to satisfying the project quality standards. Continuous quality improvement, Kaizen, a Japanese philosophy for improvement, is an additional goal of quality assurance. Lean is another quality assurance concept that involves processes to minimize waste while maximizing customer value. Benchmarking compares specific project practices and product features to other projects and products and uses results for quality improvements. A quality audit reviews quality management pursuits for improvements and lessons learned.

Controlling Quality

Quality acceptance or rejection decisions, rework, and process adjustments are the main outputs of quality control. The Seven Basic Tools of Quality are, cause and effect diagrams, quality control charts, checksheets, scatter diagrams, histograms, Pareto charts, and flowcharts.

Testing

Many IT professionals think that testing occurs near the end of the development lifecycle. However, testing occurs at every stage. Requirements validation is a form of testing requirements by validating that system specifications map directly to a functional requirement, and that functional requirements map to a business requirement. A user test case is created for each functional requirement to ensure that the correct tests are performed. Unit testing is performed during development. After development, integration testing takes place; then system testing is performed. User acceptance testing finally occurs last before a service or product is released. Figure 2 shows testing tasks in the software development lifecycle.

Figure 2 Testing Tasks in the Software Development Life Cycle (Schwalbe, 2015)

Types of Tests

Unit testing occurs as each component is developed to ensure that it is defect-free. After development, integration testing occurs to test functionally grouped components. During system testing the whole system as one entity. End users perform user acceptance testing is before accepting the delivered system.

Testing Alone Is Not Enough

Failure to adequately test software can be extremely costly. Watts S. Humphrey, a software quality expert, defines a software defect as something wrong with a program; anything that detracts from a program's ability to satisfy user needs. Defects can be identified, described, and counted. The earlier a defect is removed in the software development cycle, the less expensive it costs. A defect removed during the requirements phase costs tremendously less than a defect removed after a product release. Testing does not adequately prevent software defects. The tests performed cannot cover all of the numerous ways a complex system can be tested. Additionally, users discover new ways to use a system that its testers never considered. Humphrey suggests that developers revise their processes to provide error-free code at each stage of testing.

Modern Quality Management

Modern quality management calls for customer satisfaction, observes management responsibility for quality, and favors prevention to inspection. Deming, Crosby, Juran, Taguchi, Ishikawa, and Feigenbaum are quality experts who advanced modern quality management.

Malcolm Baldrige Award

In 1987, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award was created to acknowledge companies that achieved a level of world-class competition through quality management. The President of the United States gives three awards each year in different categories, manufacturing, service, small business, and education and health care.

ISO Standards

ISO 9000 is a quality system standard that guides organizations in a continuous cycle of planning, controlling, and documenting quality. ISO standards propose minimum requirements needed for an organization to meet its quality certification standards. Quality standards help organizations reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Improving Information Technology Project Quality

Suggestions for improving IT project quality include:

· Set up leadership that encourages quality

· Recognize the cost of quality

· Concentrate on how organizations and the workplace affect quality

· Adhere to maturity models

The Cost of Quality

A study found that each year, software defects cost the US economy $59.6 billion. Better testing could eliminate a third of the defects. The cost of quality is the cost of nonconformance, taking responsibilities for failures, and the cost of conformance, delivering products that meet quality standards.

Five Cost Categories Related to Quality

– Prevention cost is the cost of designing and implementing a project such that it is error-free or contains errors within an acceptable range.

– Appraisal cost is the cost of assessing processes and their outputs to confirm quality

– Internal failure cost is the cost of correcting defects before the product is delivered to the customer.

– External failure cost is the cost related to all errors found and corrected after delivery to the customer.

– Measurement and test equipment costs are costs of equipment employed in defect prevention and quality appraisal activities.

References

Schwalbe, K. (2015). Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.