What is quality

A brief introduction to Project Quality Management related to PMBOK 5th edition.

1. The Quality Prepared by Arch. Saad Al Jabri

2. What is Quality? Quality is: “meeting the requirements of the customer”. There is a common conflict in understanding Quality Assurance Q A and Quality Control Q C

3. Quality Assurance QA Assure the quality of the product, service or result. Assurance is making sure that product comes out of defect free and confirms to stated requirements. QA prime objective is to prevent defects in deliverables to avoid the rework , which cost a lot .

4. Quality Assurance QA It is a proactive process, is a process based approach, starts at the beginning of the project to understand the product’s stated and non-stated requirements and expectations, then develops the plan to meet these requirements and expectations.

5. QA examples Quality audit training, process definition, selection of control tools (e.g. Affinity Diagrams, periodization matrices)

6. Quality Control QA is concerned with the operational activities and techniques that are used to fulfill the requirements of quality. The quality control process includes the activities which ensure a high quality product. These activities focus on identifying defects in the actual product being produced.

7. Quality Control QA Quality control functions start once the project work has begun. Quality control is a reactive approach and helps you find defects in deliverables. QC objective is to make sure that the deliverables are defect free and acceptable as per the quality requirements set in the quality assurance process. If the deliverables are not found as per the requirements, a suitable corrective action will be taken.

8. QC examples Inspection, product testing, Statistical sampling, 7 QTs (e.g. Flowcharting, check sheets, control chart)

9. QA & QC The quality control process receives input from the quality assurance process

10. QA & QC if the project team finds any defect during the project execution, they will correct the error and the feedback will be sent to the QA team. The QA team will investigate the cause of this error and they will take a corrective and/or preventive action in the process so that this error should never happen again in the future. once the process is updated, the QC team will follow the process defined by the QA team so that the defect does not recur.

11. QA vs. QC Quality Assurance Quality Control Preventive process Corrective process Focus on processes, how things are made or delivered Focus on outputs, work in progress and finished goods Focus on building in quality Focus on testing for quality Preventing defects Detecting defects Assure we are doing the right thing, the right way Makes sure the result of what we’ve done are what we expected Targeted at the whole organization Targeted at production activities Proactive process Reactive process