CHAPTER 23
Use the Quality Discipline to Hit the Target
INTRODUCTION
When the roof leaks on a new house, that's a quality failure.
When an information system provides the reports that management asked for, but not what they really need, that's a quality failure.
When a new video game just isn't that fun, that's a quality failure.
Whether the product is built incorrectly or the wrong product is built, it's a quality failure.
Clarifying the target and demonstrating that the product or service is on target is the realm of the quality discipline.
Quality is a well‐developed discipline with a depth and breadth that matches project management. In this chapter we can only scratch the surface, so we will focus on general principles that will guide project managers to ask the right questions and prioritize activities associated with quality. After completing this chapter, readers will also understand whether they would benefit by adding quality to their study plan to become a more well‐rounded project leader.
Requirements and Quality Are Tightly Related
Requirements describe what the project is intended to produce. To put that in the context of our cost‐schedule‐scope triple constraint, requirements are focused primarily on the product scope. If we say a military aircraft will be stealthy, the requirements will detail just exactly what that means. With that target set, quality techniques assure that the product is built correctly and that there are meaningful tests at key points in the development process. As a result, the finished aircraft can be tested to ensure that it is as invisible as intended.
Quality Tools Improve Products and Processes
Clarifying quality targets and ensuring the product meets requirements is one dimension of quality management. Another significant application of the quality discipline is to design and improve the processes that we use both during the project and during operations. Quality techniques are used to reduce unnecessary cost and effort in the way we perform our work. Or we might investigate and revise activities in a manufacturing line because it is creating products that don't meet specifications. Later in this chapter we'll explore Six Sigma as an example of a process‐improvement method.
Project Managers Rely on Subject Matter Experts and Quality Experts
The right steps to deliver a quality product or service are different from project to project. In this chapter, we'll see that project managers know the right questions to ask and rely on the people with specific technical knowledge and skills—often called subject matter experts (SMEs)—to add the details. That's not to say that a project manager won't have relevant technical knowledge. Instead, we are emphasizing that the expertise required to do a job correctly is integrated into every part of quality activities.
As you read this chapter it will become clear that it can take years to develop expertise in quality tools and concepts. That means adding a quality expert to the team is often a benefit.
THE COST OF QUALITY
In 1979, quality pioneer Philip Crosby published his book Quality Is Free.1 This catchy title might mislead us. It does not mean that we do not need to invest in the practices that improve our products and processes. Rather, Crosby argues that the investment in quality is less than the savings that are achieved by avoiding rework, dissatisfied customers, and wasted material. In effect, he is saying it is cheaper to do it right the first time. This principle is called the Cost of Quality.
Cost of Nonconformance
The expenses associated with poor quality are called the cost of nonconformance. Some of these costs can be measured, such as rework. If a wall is painted the wrong color, the cost of rework is the materials and labor to cover the wall with primer and apply the correct color of paint. Other costs of nonconformance are much more difficult to measure, such as the dissatisfaction of a customer who tells their friends, “That painting company just can't be trusted. They painted the entire room the wrong color!”
Software that works incorrectly can produce minor irritation or dramatic errors. An ATM user might simply be frustrated if they can't access their account information. As software controls an increasing amount of our vehicles' operations, the cost of nonconformance has included fatal crashes.
As we look at multiple projects, we notice that as one project extends its schedule to perform rework, another project is delayed. This is another illustration that the cost of nonconformance can ripple outward, making the total cost of nonconformance large and difficult to quantify.
Cost of Conformance
We can see the Cost of Quality failures can climb quickly. The costs associated with making a better product are called the cost of conformance. There are many activities that have a direct impact on quality, including:
- Skill training so work is performed according to an industry standard.
- Inspection of work at critical steps.
- Peer reviews, such as the code reviews that take place on software development projects.
Documenting work procedures can have tremendous impact. In his book The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande chronicles the thousands of lives saved when doctors and nurses began to verbally follow a simple checklist for inserting a central line, a routine medical procedure.2 (A central line is a 12‐inch catheter pushed into the jugular vein.)
In this case, the correct five steps were well known. The difference was that the medical team simply began to speak the steps out loud.
Training, peer reviews, and documenting procedures take effort and expertise. They are not free. However, when we compare the costs associated with performing the work correctly to the costs of nonconformance there is an overpowering case for a proactive investment in quality.
BUILD THE QUALITY DISCIPLINE INTO A PROJECT
Although the quality discipline is much too large to cover in this chapter, we can break it down into some major components that any project manager can include in their project. The following sections will help you understand what questions and related quality activities you should see on a project. The very first concept is most fundamental, the definition of quality.
The Definition of Quality
There are considerable misunderstandings about quality and what it means to produce a high‐quality product. Let's start with a classic definition of quality from Philip Crosby, then move on to address misperceptions.
Crosby defines quality as “conformance to requirements.” Essentially, will the project produce exactly what has been asked for? Of course, this takes us back to the importance of meaningful requirements from the previous chapter.
Another quality pioneer, Joseph Juran, defined quality as “fitness for use.” This definition pushes us further, forcing us to consider how a product would be used, asking questions beyond the requirements we're given by users or customers.
Don't Confuse Grade with Quality
When it's time to put new tires on your car there are many choices, even from the same manufacturer. One style may be designed to last 25,000 miles while another style is rated for 50,000 miles. Is the 50,000‐mile tire better quality? No. It is a higher grade. If quality is conformance to requirements, the measure of quality is how well the different tire styles live up to their rating.
Why would anyone want a lower grade of tire or lower grade of anything? Because different grades are intended for different purposes. When buying tires for my 20‐year old minivan, I wanted tires that would last about 20,000 miles, which is the expected life for the rest of the vehicle. That is an example of fitness for use.
We should be able to determine the intended grade by paying attention to requirements.
When Better Isn't Better
If you live in Seattle, Washington, you are likely to own at least one raincoat. But does every bus commuter who spends ten minutes walking from the bus stop need the same grade of rain gear as a commercial fisherman who might spend day after day getting soaked by waves and rain? Of course not. That would be an unnecessary expense.
Yet this type of upgrade regularly takes place on projects under the guise of providing a quality product. The people most guilty of unnecessary upgrades are the experts who design and build the product. These people deeply understand and inherently value the potential excellence they could create, so they work to make the product the best that it can be. Yet if they make it better than it needs to be, they are also probably making it more expensive than it needs to be. We call that gold plating.
Six Sigma Quality
A popular term within discussions of quality is Six Sigma. Six Sigma is both a quality approach and a quality standard.
When we introduced the cost of nonconformance, we cited examples of the cost of producing a product or service that fails to meet expectations. In search of reducing these costs, quality practitioners will set a goal and measure the frequency that the goal is missed. To reduce the number of failures, the process is refined, over and over, making the process more reliable and the result consistently better. The Six Sigma method is one approach to continuous process improvement. We'll examine this method in more depth later in this chapter.
The Six Sigma quality standard describes the amount of variation in the output of a process. For example, when traveling in Germany by rail, you may notice that the trains are very punctual. If you captured the actual departure time of a particular train and compared that to its stated schedule, you would be able to see the train's schedule variation. If the train departing two minutes early or two minutes late was the standard of performance, you would then see the number of departures that were outside the acceptable window.
Any process can have variation. A statistical analysis of the variation will show the range of performance. When the variation in a process is narrowed to six standard deviations, it has achieved Six Sigma quality. In simple terms, this means that for every one million outputs of the process, there are only three that do not meet the standard of acceptance. For our German train, that would mean for every one million stops, there would only be three times it departed more than two minutes early or late.
While Six Sigma has been popularized as a measure of variance, it is by no means the right goal for every process. The cost of achieving this target may not be justified. Ironically, unless it is clearly necessary and worthwhile, this level of process performance could become an example of gold‐plating.
Meeting the Six Sigma variance target is covered in the PMP® Exam Prep bonus video Measure Quality, which is found at www.VersatileCompany.com/FastForwardPM.
QUALITY ASSURANCE AND QUALITY CONTROL
We previously listed skill training and inspections as two examples of an investment in quality. Notice that training improves the way the work is performed, while inspection evaluates the result of the work. Training is an example of quality assurance and inspection is an example of quality control. Quality assurance and quality control are both important for meeting quality targets. They are not, strictly speaking, separate. The act of planning for inspections is considered quality assurance. Performing the inspections is a quality control activity. This distinction is not particularly critical. It is more important to understand the nature of activities a project manager should expect to see carried out during the project.
Quality Assurance: Confidence in Our Process
The strict definition of quality assurance, according to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), is to build confidence among our stakeholders that quality requirements will be fulfilled.3 Project managers can approach quality assurance with a simple question: “What can we do to build confidence that the project will produce results that meet quality requirements?” The responses could be almost limitless, certainly more than the project could reasonably implement. Here are just a few examples:
- Determine the appropriate industry standards for performing work. If none exist, take the time to create a standard that will be used on the project.
- For every work package or detailed task listed on the work breakdown structure (WBS) document its completion criteria. How will it be judged as complete and performed correctly?
- Bring subcontractors and inspectors together to establish performance standards and inspection points. Recognize that inspection points must take place as the product is designed and built, so that defects are identified early. The earlier a problem is found, the less costly it is to remedy.
Developing your quality assurance activities has similarities to identifying risks and opportunities: you should identify more than you can possibly implement, then prioritize. Involve different stakeholder groups to brainstorm ways to build in quality and inspect for quality. Then prioritize these ideas using the Cost of Quality principle discussed earlier: compare the cost of conformance with the cost of nonconformance and implement the ideas that have the greatest benefit‐to‐cost ratio.
Build Confidence with a Quality Plan
Quality assurance should build confidence among your stakeholders. Document the high‐priority quality actions. If your project is big or specialized enough to deserve a quality specialist, be sure their name and responsibility is on the quality plan.
A Leadership Challenge
A significant advance in the field of quality was recognizing that quality cannot be inspected into a product. That is, no matter how much we evaluate the end product to find errors, the opportunity for improvement exists upstream, in the processes for creating the product. Project managers who invest in identifying quality assurance actions may need to defend the related increase in their project budgets. They have the Cost of Quality principle on their side.
Quality Control: Demonstrate Conformance to Requirements
There are many ways that quality control is performed on projects. Here are a few examples:
- In the video game industry, young game enthusiasts covet the job of trying to break a game that is in development. These testers work passionately to ensure the game progresses as intended, no matter what crazy actions are taken by a player.
- As a new commercial jet is developed, a new engine capable of greater power is required. To test that engine, a testing facility will be built, enabling a prototype engine to undergo numerous test conditions. The prototype is rigorously tested before it would ever be included on a prototype aircraft with a test pilot in the cockpit.
- For a detailed example of inspection, enter “concrete inspection checklist” in your search engine. You'll quickly find that many state transportation departments have detailed checklists posted, demonstrating a standard of performance and a method for inspecting before and after the pour takes place.
With these examples, we can see that there are as many ways to test products as there are products to be created. And we can also see the essential value of quality control. Failure to perform rigorous testing during the project could result in catastrophic failures for a highway, aircraft, and even a video game company.
The project manager sets the tone throughout the project and that remains true for quality control activities. The purpose of quality control activities is to find problems. Software test teams take pride in breaking the system, finding bugs during development so users don't find them when the system is released. Project managers set the tone by recognizing problem detection as a success and building time into the plan for finding and fixing problems.
In addition to quality control activities, projects must have well‐organized records of the test and inspection results. These results will build a narrative providing evidence that the project is on track to deliver the intended quality. If testing and inspection results do not show the product is on track, it is even more important to be able to monitor the effects of the recovery activities. For example, software projects use bug tracking applications that show whether the total number of software problems is growing or shrinking.
Bring in the Test Team
There are people who specialize in testing and inspection for all kinds of work. Know who these people are for your project and include these experts as early as possible in the development process. Their input will improve requirements, design, and construction activities and they will be instrumental in planning the quality control activities.
QUALITY PRACTICES IMPROVE REQUIREMENTS
Chapter 22 described the process of eliciting and maintaining requirements and pointed out that business analysts are often responsible for writing requirements on information systems projects. Software testers, the people responsible for testing each unit of code and the overall system, also make important contributions to requirements.
Requirements will describe how a process or product is supposed to work. The testers ask, “What if it doesn't work?” How should the system respond when error conditions are encountered? These types of questions make requirements more complete.
In fact, some of the best analysts have spent time testing software earlier in their career. The mentality required for designing a thorough test is the same thought process that helps to refine requirements.
An important standard for requirements is that they are measurable. However, unless they are trained in quality, the customer or user may not think precisely about what they want, leading to an unclear standard. In our previous Six Sigma example we considered the on‐time performance of a commuter train. Success was defined as “departing the station within two minutes of the time stated on the schedule.” That is a measurable standard. As requirements are developed, include the people who are responsible for quality control.
THE QUALITY DISCIPLINE IMPROVES PROCESSES
Building quality into a project or an operation is a dominant theme in the quality discipline. Many companies believe wholeheartedly in the principle of the Cost of Quality: that investments in quality will produce big savings and improve their customer satisfaction. These firms don't just include quality experts on their projects; they initiate projects with the sole purpose of improving processes. One common approach for this type of project is Six Sigma. We will examine Six Sigma as an example of a structured problem‐solving approach to process improvement that embodies many quality principles and techniques.
Six Sigma Is a Standard and a Methodology
Earlier in this chapter we gave an example of Six Sigma as a standard for quality. Achieving that type of improvement isn't easy. The Six Sigma process improvement methodology was originally developed at Motorola. It is a product development approach, as discussed in Chapter 4.
A methodology combines consistent phases and techniques. Six Sigma uses a five‐phase methodology, known by its initials: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control, routinely called DMAIC for short.
Let's briefly review the DMAIC stages to grasp the major activities.
Define: Agree on the Problem and the Plan
The Define activities can include all the topics from Chapters 5–10. Done well, it creates a strong project start. The stage includes problem definition, stakeholder identification, scheduling, risk identification, and creating a communication plan. As with every project, the most important activity is the analysis necessary to write a project charter. For a Six Sigma project, this analysis also includes the benefit to cost comparison and financial justification that would be part of a project business case, as described in Chapter 5.
The goals of this stage are to have a common understanding of the method of measuring the project's benefits and the scope of the process that is the target for improvement. The process boundaries are illustrated with a high‐level process map.
Measure: Capture the Current State
Before any improvements can be recommended, the current state of the process is thoroughly understood. That typically includes a detailed process map showing the steps in a process, with data for every step, such as who is involved, how long it takes, and the information and material used in the process. The skill needed to build a process map may require a quality specialist to act as a facilitator while the people who participate in the process provide the facts.
This phase produces a list of the type of measurements that will ultimately demonstrate that the process is better at the end of the project. Therefore, it is critical to find or create reliable, repeatable methods of measuring activities within the process.
Analyze: Find the Potential Improvement Points
Analyze contains the hard work of looking at the process, uncovering substandard performance, and drilling deeper to understand the actual causes of problems. At times this analysis reveals an obvious opportunity to make a quick improvement, allowing the team to claim an early victory and to generate new data that substantiates their progress.
The Analyze stage puts a big part of the quality toolset to work. The team will benchmark the process, comparing it to similar, higher‐performing processes. Where problems are found, they use many root cause analysis methods that include statistical analysis and group problem‐solving techniques like brainstorming. The result is a prioritized list of the opportunities for improvement, which will focus the efforts in the next stage.
The structured problem‐solving techniques employed in Analyze are not unique to the Six Sigma methodology. They belong in every quality expert's toolbox.
Improve: Select and Deploy Solutions
The Improve stage demands the creativity to generate solutions and the skills to implement them. The team draws on creativity tools during this stage to generate many possible improvements. Potential solutions may be small, inexpensive adjustments or expensive comprehensive upgrades. Next, they'll use group decision techniques to rank ideas and select the best ones. The same process maps created in the Measure stage can be updated to show the proposed changes, including how the revised process will be measured.
Selected solutions go through a pilot phase. Pilots demonstrate that the change will create the desired measurable benefits. From there, the changes are integrated into the process. For significant changes, such as the deployment of a software application, the Improve stage can become a project in itself.
Control: Transition to Operations
In project management terms, this is the end of the project and the transition to operations. Activities are focused on ensuring the solutions are working and turning over documentation that will be useful to the process owner, such as the process maps and performance metrics. The stage name Control corresponds to the need to continue monitoring and to demonstrate that there is a new, higher level of performance.
DMAIC Projects Need Project Managers
The DMAIC phases and techniques focus on how to perform the analytical work and design products and processes. This makes DMAIC a development approach, as defined in Chapter 4. These projects do begin with the classic project management deliverables, as shown in the Define stage above. They have project sponsors, stakeholders, risks, schedules, and need regular status reports. Most of all, they need the leadership that combines the art and science of project management.
QUALITY IS AN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT
When companies embrace Six Sigma, it goes far beyond using DMAIC for project methodologies. Personnel in the organization become certified in the use of the techniques. Some people have full‐time jobs ensuring the methodologies are used correctly. It also becomes a method for selecting projects.
This holistic attitude was core to the principles promoted by W. Edwards Deming, a quality pioneer whose writings and leadership have influenced the development and practice of the quality discipline since the 1950s. Deming advocated a systems view of the entire organization that extended far beyond statistical process improvement, as demonstrated by this quote:
The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.
—W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis4
END POINT
Will customers be delighted with the result of the project? Will everyone have confidence in it? Will the project save time and money because the additional costs of rework and wasted materials were avoided?
These are the benefits of putting the quality discipline to work on your project.
Quality assurance and quality control take different forms on every project, but all project managers should be asking how these critical functions will be performed on their projects. Quality assurance activities build quality into the product or service. Quality control evaluates the outputs of tasks or the entire project, measuring whether it hits the target set by requirements.
The quality discipline is as broad and deep as the discipline of project management. A quality specialist will aid in developing and carrying out a quality plan. Performing quality assurance and quality control activities often takes a subject matter expert. The budget for these individuals is justified by the Cost of Quality principle.
The Cost of Quality principle is that the investment required to build the right product correctly is less than the cost of nonconformance. These costs include fixing mistakes and the difficult‐to‐measure pain of a dissatisfied customer. When organizations embrace this principle, they take it beyond quality assurance and quality control on projects. They invest in quality specialists and use methodologies like Six Sigma to continuously improve the way they work.
As a project manager grows in maturity, a deeper understanding of the quality discipline is a strategic strength.
PMP Exam Prep Questions
- You are the project manager on a project that will improve the manufacturing process at your company. Quality has been a big issue and a lot of products have been returned by customers. The current manufacturing process has one sigma quality. The general consensus is that there are process problems creating the problem. Which of the following is the best option to make the process more consistent?
- Watch for violations of the seven run rule.
- Make greater use of checklists.
- Increase the quality standard to a sigma level greater than one.
- Use a fishbone diagram.
- The company is focused on being more proactive regarding quality. Once quality improves, which of the following is most likely for the product support department?
- Increased warranty support
- Decreased warranty support
- Increased inventory requirements
- Decreased inventory requirements
- Match the concept with the creator.
- TQM and Joseph Juran, Fitness for Use and W. Edwards Deming, Zero Defects and Philip Crosby
- TQM and W. Edwards Deming, Fitness for Use and Joseph Juran, Zero Defects and Philip Crosby
- TQM and W. Edwards Deming, Fitness for Use and Philip Crosby, Zero Defects and Joseph Juran
- TQM and Philip Crosby, Fitness for Use and W. Edwards Deming, Zero Defects and Joseph Juran
Answers to these questions can be found at www.VersatileCompany.com/FastForwardPM.