Marginalia

• Enterprise environmental factors in this context refer to "regulations, rules, standards, and guidelines" prescribed by governmental agencies (comp. PMBOK3, p. 184).

• And Organizational process assets in this context refer to "organizational quality policies, procedures and guidelines, historical databasess and lessons learned from previous projects [...]" (comp. PMBOK3, p. 184)

• The failure cost allone are reffered by the concept of "cost of poor quality".

(5.1) Quality Planning

(5.1.1) Process Input

... generated by predecessor processes

... introduced by external units

  • Enterprise Environmental Factors
  • Organizational Process Assets

(5.1.2) Process Definition

Quality Planning is the process for "identifying which quality standards are relevant to the project and determining how to satisfy them": Quality planning means planning howto fullfill process and product (deliverable) quality requirements: "Quality is the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fullfill requirements" (comp. PMBOK3, pp. 179f, 183)

By planning the quality one has to respect some principles:

  • Customer satisfaction comes first: Quality is defined by the requirements of the customer.
  • Prevention over inspection: It's better to avoid mistakes than to inspect the result and repair the defects.
  • Management responsibility: Costs of quality must be approved by the management.
  • Continuous improvement: Becoming better is an iteratively structured process.

(comp. PMBOK3, p. 181). These sentences implicate the rule, that gold plating is not an indicator of quality; it has to be avoided.

The subject Quality operates on the base of other quality concerning concepts

(5.1.3) Tools and Techniques

PMBOK Mentioned Methods

  • Cost-benefit analysis is a method to determine whether the wished quality standards can or should be payed.
  • Benchmarking may be thought as the process of comparing the actual project to other projects for "generating ideas for improvement" and "providing a basis by which to measure performance"
  • Design of experiments is a method for investigating the influence of single parameters on the degree of quality of the whole product / process
  • Cost of quality "[...] are the total costs incurred by investment in preventing nonconformance to requirements, appraising the product or service for conformance to requirements, and failing to meet requirements".
  • Additional quality planning tools may support the quality planning process. Such tools and techniques are "brainstorming", "affinity diagrams", "force field analysis", "nominal group techniques", "matrix diagrams", "flowcharts", and "prioritization matrices"

(comp. PMBOK3, pp. 185f)

Open Source Tools

  • NN

(5.1.4) Process Output

  • The Quality Management Plan is a document describing "[...] how the project management team will implement the performing organization's quality policy".
  • The Quality Metrics are building a system of scales and procedures for measuring the quality
  • The Quality Checklists are building a set of documents "[...] to verify that a set of required steps has been performed"
  • The Process Improvement Plan "[...] details the steps for analyzing processes that will facilitate the identification of waste and non-value added activity [...]", for example process boundaries, process configurations or process metrics or targets for improved performance.
  • The Quality Baseline is the set of quality objectives which must be met by the project
  • Update of the Project Management Plan will at least implicitely be generated because the Quality Management Plan is part of the Project Management Plan

(comp. PMBOK3, pp. 186f)

(5.1.5) Output Using Successor Processes

Successors using the initially generated output as own input(1):

Processes using the updates as input(2):

  1. For details see FAQ::Q001:1
  2. For details see FAQ::Q001:2