B.1 Quality in Project Management

The triple constraints of project management – scope, budget, and schedule – are often referred to as the iron triangle because that name conveys the extent to which these constraints affect the execution and outcome of every project. As you learned in Lesson 3, a change to one constraint necessitates a change to at least one other constraint to keep the triangle whole. For example, if you need to expand the project's scope, then you'll have to either increase the budget or slow the schedule to complete the additional work. Similarly, if you decrease the budget, you'll have to either decrease the schedule or reduce the scope to make it possible to complete the project with the available funds. And speeding up a schedule to complete the stated scope will inevitably require a higher budget.

Any adjustments to the triple constraints can affect the quality of the project's outcome. That's why the iron triangle (or the project management triangle, as it is also called) is usually portrayed with the word "Quality" at the center, as shown in Figure B-1. Indeed, many project management experts consider quality to be the fourth constraint on every project.


Figure B-1. Maintaining the required level of quality requires balancing the constraints of scope, budget, and schedule.

Quality's position at the center of the iron triangle emphasizes the need to consider quality when inevitable trade-offs between constraints are made in a living order project. As you learned in Lesson 3, scope evolution often occurs in living order projects as the project team develops a more in-depth understanding of the customer's requirements. Changes to the scope might result in a revised definition of quality for the product of the project, which could require an extended project timeline. Conversely, cuts to a project's budget could require that the project team work with the customer to develop a new definition of quality for a particular deliverable.

Balancing Project Constraints Using a Cost-Benefit Analysis

To help the customer or project sponsor make decisions about balancing project constraints while maintaining the required level of quality, a project leader may undertake a formal or informal cost-benefit analysis, which involves adding up the benefits of a specific action and then subtracting the costs associated with that action. This form of analysis is useful when making decisions involving constraint trade-offs as well as larger decisions such as deciding which of two proposed projects to proceed with.

These two articles provide more details on cost-benefit analysis:

Talking about Quality

The term quality can mean different things in different industries, organizations, and groups of people. But the American Society for Quality (ASQ) spells out two hallmarks of quality: "fitness for use" and "conformance to requirements".

In other words, a product, building, or service can be considered high quality if it is fit for the use for which it was intended and if it conforms to its predefined requirements. But how do you go about making that determination in a way that ensures all stakeholders will agree? You need to create an objective standard in the form of SMART requirements.

Since the early 1980s, businesses have used variations of SMART criteria to evaluate their objectives. The term "SMART" is an acronym for the following attributes that ensure objectives are actually achievable: specific, measurable, assignable (or agreed on), realistic and time-based. In the context of project quality, the most important aspect of the SMART approach is the need to be specific about scope requirements, so it is clear that the project deliverables meet those requirements. To avoid misunderstandings about quality requirements – and possible rework – defining what is not in scope is just as important as defining what is in scope.

Of course, the goal of any project is to build quality in from the bottom up. This entails constant reference to the customer's definition of value, and then translating that definition into actual engineering requirements. One widely used method for accomplishing this is quality function deployment (QFD) or the "voice of the customer". This technique helps organizations translate the product attributes the customer wants into tangible, measurable requirements that the project team can deliver. QFD makes use of a product planning matrix, commonly referred to as the House of Quality, as well as technical and competitive benchmarking to establish target values for each product design requirement. At its best, QFD can take subjective qualitative attributes and establish links to quantitative metrics that will ensure customer satisfaction, and it can be a particularly helpful technique in terms of establishing what the team needs to work on to deliver the scope of the project within the customer's definition of quality.

Delivering Quality versus Gold Plating

Taking the time to develop SMART criteria for judging quality while also employing a method like QFD to systematically build quality in from the bottom up will help you avoid falling into the trap of gold plating, which means adding functionality that exceeds the project's requirements, "possibly even beyond what is practical or reasonable for the effort". As noted in an article on the Global Knowledge website: "Quality is not about giving the customer extras or completing extra work". For starters, the extras added to a deliverable may be based on "erroneous perceptions of what you believe the customer wants. These extras add time, possible costs, and other impacts to a project, but do not always result in increased customer satisfaction".

Rexter Retana, a civil engineer and project manager, views scope creep and gold plating as two sides of the same coin. One is a result of incremental change requests from the customer; the other is a result of the project team, or individual team members, adding features or deliverables that were not included in the original requirements. According to Retana, gold plating can have several negative consequences, including driving up project costs by consuming additional time and resources, increasing project risk, especially if the extra features or deliverables are not documented, raising the client's expectations for future projects, and fueling client dissatisfaction – and even legal disputes – if the gold plating results in budget and schedule overruns.

The Cost of Quality

Delivering a project's quality requirements means considering the cost of quality, which includes costs over the life of the product, not just those incurred during the project. Quality costs are typically divided into two categories: cost of conformance (or good quality) and cost of nonconformance (or bad quality). The costs within each category are often broken out further, as shown in Figure B-2.


Figure B-2. The cost of conformance (prevention/appraisal costs) reflects the time and money required to prevent problems and defects, while the cost of nonconformance (internal/external failure costs) reflect the time and money to recover from them.
Cost of Conformance

The cost of conformance, or the cost of good quality, includes the cost of preventing quality defects as well as the cost of appraising or detecting defects in the project deliverables or processes. Prevention costs are associated with planned activities such as setting quality standards, developing a project quality plan, conducting deliverable reviews during an Agile sprint review meeting, evaluating process capability, and educating and training team members on quality standards and processes. Appraisal costs come in the form of measuring and monitoring activities to evaluate "purchased materials, processes, products, and services to ensure that they conform to specifications". Audits, inspections, and testing also fall under the appraisal cost category.

Cost of Nonconformance

The cost of nonconformance, or the cost of poor quality, is a result of quality failures – both during and after the project. Internal failure costs, which are incurred when defects are discovered before deliverables are received by the customer, could include costs of scrap, rework, and failure analysis. External failure costs occur when deliverables that fall short of established quality standards are not detected until after transfer to the customer; such costs could accrue from repair work, complaint resolution, and warranty claims. Another way to look at nonconformance costs is to think of internal failure costs as "waste" and external failure costs as "downstream consequences," of which there can be many.

Taguchi Loss Function

The Taguchi method of quality control is "an approach to engineering that emphasizes the roles of research and development (R&D), product design, and development in reducing the occurrence of defects and failures" and ensuring the product performs exactly as designed. Underlying the Taguchi method is the assumption of a standard – that is, a target value for quality. Although customers may accept products or deliverables between the upper and lower limits of the quality specifications, they will get greater value from products that are closer to the target quality. Value for the customer decreases on either side of the target value. Another way to look at it is to consider the 'utility' of the quality being applied: Is it actually adding value to the end customer or consuming resources unnecessarily? Key to the Taguchi method is the Taguchi loss function, which measures "the cost of quality as a function of deviation from the standard," is an explicit reference to the costs of poor quality as well as the costs of quality that is too high.