Question

Quality Management:

- What is quality management and what processes are included?

- What are the Scope Aspects of IT Projects?

- What are Cause and Effect Diagrams and how do they help with quality management?

Answer 1

1)

Quality management is a discipline for ensuring that outputs, benefits, and the processes by which they are delivered, meet stakeholder requirements and are fit for purpose.

roject quality management consists of three major processes:

1. Plan quality management: identifying the quality requirements and standards for the project and product.
2. Perform quality assurance: auditing the quality requirements and quality control results to ensure appropriate quality standards are used.
3. Control quality: monitoring and recording the results of quality activities to assess performance and recommend necessary changes.

The definition of quality is central to understanding these three processes. To be able to define quality, you need to be clear about the meaning of the following terms:

• Validation: assurance that the product meets the agreed-upon needs
• Verification: compliance with requirements
• Precision: repeatable measures in a tight grouping
• Accuracy: closeness of a measure to the true value
• Tolerance: range of acceptable results

2)

Define the Product Requirements

Before we determine what will be in the project’s scope, you must be very clear about what are the product requirements, otherwise known as product scope. In other words, what are the functions and features required for the website, application and/or software solution being developed? Is there anything specifically that must be built into the design? Must it follow a specific set of branding guidelines? The list goes on.

Define the Process Requirements

Process requirements describe how people interact with a product and how a product interacts with other (often existing) business processes. When you discuss how data gets moved and how business transactions flow from one point to another, you are describing process requirements. For example, the requirements for billing transactions within a website, how such transactions link to invoicing and accounts, and at what point can staff view and alter the status of orders needs to be detailed.

Involve the correct stakeholders

It of course goes without saying that for a project to be delivered successfully, the correct stakeholders from the organisation commissioning the project must be involved very intimately at various stages of the project scope. When this does not occur, assumptions begin to be made (which are generally subjective) and stakeholder confusion can occur as the project goes on.

Identify the limitations

Perhaps even more important than what is in-scope for a project is what is out-of-scope for a project. Often it is crucial to document what will not be done – otherwise people will assume that certain things are to be executed that were not budgeted for or included in the project timeline.

Change Management

It is natural for parts of any large project to change along the way. While it is always best to avoid scope creep (a situation in which one or more parts of a project ends up requiring more work), sometimes it is unavoidable due to the changing nature of any business. In order to avoid disagreements and changes to a project’s scope by all stakeholders, both client-side and agency-side, it is best to have strict change management processes in place. Once scope is defined, it must not be changed without the appropriate change management functions taking place, at which point appropriate action can be taken to address the shifting project requirements.

3)

A cause and effect diagram examines why something happened or might happen by organizing potential causes into smaller categories. It can also be useful for showing relationships between contributing factors. One of the Seven Basic Tools of Quality, it is often referred to as a fishbone diagram or Ishikawa diagram.

One of the reasons cause & effect diagrams are also called fishbone diagrams is because the completed diagram ends up looking like a fish's skeleton with the fish head to the right of the diagram and the bones branching off behind it to the left.

There are 5 major benefits of Fishbone Diagram:

1. Display relationships clearly and logically - The fishbone diagram captures the links and relationships among the potential causes and results displayed in the diagram. Categorized logically, the correlation can be understood at a glance.

2. Show all causes simultaneously - Any cause or causal chain featured on the fishbone diagram could lead to the problem. The fishbone diagram illustrates each and every possible reason in a single diagram, which is beneficial for in-depth analysis. This makes it a useful tool for presenting the problem and solutions to stakeholders.

3. Facilitate brainstorming - Edraw fishbone diagram is a great way to boost and structure brainstorming about the reasons for a certain result because it captures all the causes.

4. Stimulate problem solving - Seeing the reasons in visual graph and exploring the root cause may stimulate your team to find out possible solutions to the problems.

5. Help maintain team focus - The fishbone framework can keep your team focused as you discuss what should be done to solve the problem or achieve a common goal. It helps to analyze every involved party. And it ensures that nobody is wasting energy chasing nonexistent problems.