Other Tools for Quality Assurance and Control
Mentioned elsewhere in this book are planning and control methods that also apply to
quality assurance and control. For example, much of the quality assurance effort in a product
design project is directed at keeping the project team focused on customer requirements, and
making sure that those requirements do not become distorted or misinterpreted as the project
moves from stage to stage and the work changes hands. Quality function deployment (QFD)
discussed in Chapter 4 is a method for defining customer requirements and ensuring that those
requirements remain in the focus throughout the design and production process. Likewise,
checklists as described in this book for preparing plans, assessing risks, and monitoring work
progress help maintain quality by assuring that important issues or items are not overlooked.
These checklists can be used for inspections, testing, design reviews, and FMEA. A potential
disadvantage of checklists is that people rely on them too much and ignore issues or items not
on the list. The last item on every checklist should be “ Now, list and scrutinize all perceived
important items not on this checklist! ”
Quality management is necessary to ensure compliance with the quality criteria of a
project. Along with scheduling and budgeting, quality management addresses one of the
dimensions of the project target—satisfying requirements and specifications. Quality takes into
account project end-item compliance to specifications, fitness for the purpose, and customer
expectations. It does not necessarily imply the highest grade or most product features, nor
does it imply the highest cost or even zero defects. It implies simply the “ best ” based upon
customer expectations and the intended usage of the end-item. Quality management can be
divided into three processes: quality planning , quality assurance , and quality control . Quality
planning is an integral part of project planning and involves setting the standards and
specifications to be met, identifying all the quality-related activities, and scheduling and
budgeting of these activities.
Quality assurance is performing the planned quality activities and ensuring that the
project utilizes all processes considered necessary to meet the requirements. Quality control is
the ongoing process of monitoring and appraising work, and taking corrective action. It is an
integral part of project control and includes inspection, testing, and solving ad hoc problems.
Project management has benefited primarily from two quality philosophies— TQM and Six
Sigma, both of which emphasize continuous improvement. In a project environment,
continuous improvement is facilitated by a quality assurance process and a systematic project
closeout process with documented lessons learned. Project management has also benefited
from many of the techniques popularized by the so-called quality movements, including
statistical methods and basic problem-solving tools used for manufacturing and production.
Beyond these, however, project quality management utilizes techniques and processes
applicable to all engineering and technical endeavors; these include design reviews,
configuration identification and configuration control, classification of characteristics, FMEA,
as well as experimenting, modeling, and prototyping. Many of the techniques used for project
quality assurance and quality control are also applicable to project risk management, the
subject of the next chapter.
RISK IDENTIFICATION
Before you can manage something, you must first know about it. Thus, risk
management begins with identifying the risks and predicting their consequences. If a risk and
its consequences are significant, ways must be found to avoid or reduce the risk to an
acceptable level. What is considered “ acceptable ” depends on the risk tolerance of project
stakeholders and managers. Often, experienced managers and stakeholders are somewhat
more careful (and risk averse) because they understand the risks and their consequences,
whereas less experienced stakeholders tend to be risk-takers (more risk tolerant) because they
don ’ t know of the risks or are ignorant of the consequences. Risk in projects is sometimes
referred to as the risk of failure , which implies that a project might fall short of schedule,
budget, or technical performance goals by a significant margin. The methods to identify risk
discussed in this chapter can also be used to capitalize on opportunities , e.g., projects with
high potential for additional rewards, savings, or benefits; more typically, however, they are
used to determine the risk of failure. Among the many ways to identify project risks, one is to
proceed according to project chronology, to look at the phases and stages in the life cycle (such
as project feasibility, contract negotiation, system concept, or definition, design, and
fabrication) and identify the risks in each separately.
