Project Planning and Budgeting

Quality is defined as conformance to adequately developed requirements (Ledbetter, W. B., Lemer, A. C. and National Research Council (U.S.), 1991). According to (Project management Institute ,2013), quality is the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfil requirements. Both definitions stated ‘requirements’ either to conform or to fulfil. In the Total Quality Management, this quality ‘requirement’ mentioned in both definitions, referred to meeting the customer’s need or requirements in order to achieve the customer satisfaction through continuous quality improvement of product and services (Van Vliet, V., 2009). In order to achieve the quality required in a project, there are several tools and techniques that can be utilised for planning a project’s quality management. These tools and techniques such as Paretto diagrams, Cause-and-effect diagrams, Checksheets, Control charts, Histograms, Flowcharts and Scatter diagrams. In Paretto diagram, statistical data is plotted in chart, and the probability distribution is calculated to identify the cause of problems and frequencies of cause (Project management Institute ,2013). It is useful to observe the total performance improvement of a project whenever the cause is identified and monitored. In Cause-and-effect diagrams, the problem statement and its root causes are depicted in a fishbone diagram. While the problem statement is placed at the head of the fishbone, each root cause of the problem statement is identified by asking ‘why’ until the reasonable possibilities on each fishbone is exhausted (Project management Institute ,2013). In the symposium project, for example, whenever the project team encounter delays in preparing and organising the workshop venues, the fishbone diagram can be utilised in order to identify the cause of problem in the delays. In Flowcharts, a project process can be mapped out through displaying the sequence of steps and branching out possibilities or likelihood of new usable inputs or outputs (Project management Institute, 2013). Flowcharts can be utilised in the symposium project to estimate the cost for the conformance and nonconformance work required to be done in order to meet the financial target output.

Poor quality of work in project management could lead to the need to redo all the work that has been done previously in order to meet the customer requirement in project. This later will cause additional resources such as materials, supplies and manpower as the project team needs to reschedule the project plan. This also means that additional time is required in order to redo all the work to achieve the quality that is required in the first place.

In the given case study (Torrens University Australia, 2020), one of the event objectives is to deliver a high quality and value-added program which would be useful and last for years. The project team must identify and define what are the criteria of the required quality in the program and to find a way to measure the quality performance in order to achieve the quality that is required.