Quality Planning Tools

PMI Westchester Quality SIG

Pawan Kumar, Quality SIG Member, PMP

November 2007
Inputs for Quality Planning
 Project Management Plan -- how the project is executed,
monitored controlled, and closed.
 Project Statement of Work (SOW) - documents the product
requirements and characteristics of the product or service
that the project will be undertaken to create. Acceptance
criteria includes performance and acceptance standards.
 Organizational Process Assets - Organizational standard
processes, such as standards, policies, standard product
and project life cycles, and quality policies and procedures
(e.g., process audits, improvement targets, checklists, and
standardized process definitions for use in the organization).
 Enterprise Environmental Factors - Governmental or
industry standards (e.g., regulatory agency regulations,
product standards, quality standards, and workmanship
standards).
Quality Planning

 Quality planning involves identifying which quality standards are

relevant to the project and determining how to satisfy them.
 It is one of the key processes when doing the Planning Process
Group and during development of the project management plan
 Any required changes in the product to meet identified quality
standards may require cost or schedule adjustments, or the
desired product quality may require a detailed risk analysis of an
identified problem
Tools/Techniques for Quality planning
 Cost-Benefit Analysis - Quality planning must consider cost-benefits
tradeoffs. The primary benefit of meeting quality requirements is less
rework, which means higher productivity, lower costs, and increased
stakeholder satisfaction
 Benchmarking - Benchmarking involves comparing actual or planned
project practices to those of other projects to generate ideas for
improvement and to provide a basis by which to measure performance
 Design of Experiments (DOE)- statistical method that helps identify which
factors may influence specific variables of a product or process under
development or in production.
 Cost of Quality (COQ)- Quality costs are the total costs incurred by
investment in preventing nonconformance to requirements, appraising the
product or service for conformance to requirements, and failing to meet
requirements (rework). Failure costs are often categorized into internal and
external. Failure costs are also called cost of poor quality.
 Additional Quality Planning Tools - brainstorming, affinity diagrams, force
field analysis, nominal group techniques, matrix diagrams, flowcharts, and
prioritization matrices
Output of Quality Planning
 Quality Management Plan - describes how the project management team
will implement the performing organization’s quality policy. It provides input
to the overall project management plan and must address quality control
(QC), quality assurance (QA), and continuous process improvement for the
project.
 Quality Metrics -A metric is an operational definition that describes in very
specific terms, what something is and how the quality control process
measures it.
 Quality Checklists - A checklist is a structured tool, usually component-
specific, used to verify that a set of required steps has been performed.
Checklists may be simple or complex.
 Quality Baseline - The quality baseline records the quality objectives of the
project. The quality baseline is the basis for measuring and reporting quality
performance as part of the performance measurement baseline.
 Process Improvement Plan/Project Management Plan – Requested
changes (additions, modifications, deletions) to the project management
plan and its subsidiary plans are processed by review and disposition
through the Integrated Change Control process.
 Other outputs-Quality roles list, Implementation test chart , Project
Monitoring Checklist, Project Review Checklist, Operational Definitions
Table.
Contact Information
Pawan Kumar, Quality SIG Member, PMP

Email – pawan.kbham@gmail.com
pawan_kumar@yahoo.com
Phone- 914-962-0797