Notes on Quality Management
- Plan Quality Management
- Determines the quality standards for the project and product
- Creates the quality management plan, process improvement plan, and the quality metrics
- Control Quality (QC)
- Evaluates the products or outputs to ensure that they comply with the requirements
- Creates the QC measurements, verified deliverables, and validated changes
- Manage Quality (QA)
- Translates the quality plan into executable quality activities.
- Increases the probability of achieving quality objectives
- A component of the Manage Quality process is conducting quality assurance
- QA audits the results from QC (the QC measurements) against the quality metrics to identify areas for improvement
- Considered the umbrella over continuous process improvement
- Managing quality activities are considered a cost of conformance (money spent to avoid failures)
- Quality Approaches
- Deming – Organizations can increase quality and reduce costs by practicing continuous process improvement and by thinking of manufacturing as a system, not bits and pieces.
- Juran – Applied the Pareto principle to quality issues (80% of the problems originate from 20% of the causes) and also developed “Juran’s Trilogy”: quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement.
- Crosby – Created the principle of Doing it Right the First Time (DIRFT).
- Shewhart – Developed the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle.
- Quality Terms
- Quality – The degree to which characteristics fulfill requirements.
- Grade – A category assigned to products or services having the same functional use but different technical characteristics.
- Precision – The values of repeated measurement are consistent.
- Accuracy – The measured value is very close to the target value.
- Attribute Sampling – The result conforms, or it does not.
- Variable Sampling – The result is rated on a scale that measures the degree of conformity.
- Special Causes of Variance – Unusual events, difficult to predict.
- Common Causes of Variance – Normal process variation (aka random causes)
- Tolerances – The result is acceptable if it falls within the range specified by the tolerance.
- Control Limits – The process is in control if the result falls within the control limits.
- Quality Concepts
- Customer Satisfaction – Satisfaction is achieved through understanding, evaluating, defining, and managing expectations.
- Continuous Improvement – The PDCA cycle is the basis for quality improvement; quality initiatives should improve the quality of the project’s management as well as the quality of the project’s product.
- Prevention Over Inspection – Quality should be built into the products, not inspected in; prevention is proactive versus inspection which is reactive.
- Mutually Beneficial Partnership with Suppliers – Managing the relationship with the focus on long-term relationships versus short term gains.
- Management Responsibility – Quality requires the participation of all team members, but it is management’s responsibility to provide the appropriate tools required to deliver quality.
- Quality Tools
- Ishikawa / Fishbone / Cause & Effect: The problem statement at the head of the fishbone is the starting point to trace the source of the problem back to its root cause.
- Control Chart: Plots quality results in terms of control limits to determine stability; upper and lower specification limits reflect the maximum and minimum values allowed.
- Flowchart: Maps a process, showing activities, decision points, etc, in order to help the team anticipate quality problems and where they may occur.
- Histogram: Bar chart that shows a distribution of variables, where the height of the bar represents the frequency of occurring.
- Affinity Diagram: Organizes potential causes of defects into groups showing areas that should be prioritized
- Scatter Diagram / Correlation Chart: Shows the pattern of relationship between two variables. Uses a regression line to explain or predict how the change in an independent variable will change a dependent variable.