Quality Management Flashcards
Cost Of Quality (COQ)
The cost of quality (COQ) includes all costs incurred over the life of the product by investment in preventing nonconformance to requirements, appraising the product or service for conformance to requirements, and failing to meet requirements (rework). Failure costs are often categorized into internal (found by the project team) and external (found by the customer). Failure costs are also called the cost of poor quality.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking involves comparing actual or planned project practices or the project’s quality standards to those of comparable projects to identify best practices, generate ideas for improvement, and provide a basis for measuring performance. Benchmarked projects may exist within the performing organization or outside of it, or can be within the same application area or other application area. Benchmarking allows for analogies from projects in a different application area or different industries to be made.
Quality Metrics
A quality metric specifically describes a project or product attribute and how the Control Quality process will verify compliance to it. Some examples of quality metrics include percentage of tasks completed on time, cost performance measured by CPI, failure rate, number of defects identified per day, total downtime per month, errors found per line of code, customer satisfaction scores, and percentage of requirements covered by the test plan as a measure of test coverage.
Audits
An audit is a structured, independent process used to determine if project activities comply with organizational and project policies, processes, and procedures. A quality audit is usually conducted by a team external to the project, such as the organization’s internal audit department, PMO, or by an auditor external to the organization.
- Identifying all good and best practices being implemented
- Identifying all nonconformity, gaps, and shortcomings
- Sharing good practices introduced or implemented in similar projects in the organization and/or industry
- Proactively offering assistance in a positive manner to improve the implementation of processes to help raise team productivity
- Highlighting contributions of each audit in the lessons learned repository of the organization.
Design for X (DfX)
Design for X (DfX) is a set of technical guidelines that may be applied during the design of a product for the optimization of a specific aspect of the design. DfX can control or even improve the product’s final characteristics. The X in DfX can be different aspects of product development, such as reliability, deployment, assembly, manufacturing, cost, service, usability, safety, and quality.
Using the DfX may result in cost reduction, quality improvement, better performance, and customer satisfaction.
Check sheets
Check sheets are also known as tally sheets and are used to organize facts in a manner that will facilitate the effective collection of useful data about a potential quality problem. They are especially useful for gathering attributes data while performing inspections to identify defects; for example, data about the frequencies or consequences of defects collected.
Testing/product evaluations
Testing is an organized and constructed investigation conducted to provide objective information about the quality of the product or service under test in accordance with the project requirements. The intent of testing is to find errors, defects, bugs, or other nonconformance problems in the product or service.
Process analysis
Process analysis identifies opportunities for process improvements. This analysis also examines problems, constraints, and non-value-added activities that occur during a process.
Root cause analysis (RCA)
Root cause analysis is an analytical technique used to determine the basic underlying reason that causes a variance, defect, or risk. A root cause may underlie more than one variance, defect, or risk. It may also be used as a technique for identifying root causes of a problem and solving them.
Statistical sampling
Statistical sampling involves choosing part of a population of interest for inspection (for example, selecting 10 engineering drawings at random from a list of 75). The sample is taken to measure controls and verify quality. Sample frequency and sizes should be determined during the Plan Quality Management process.
Scatter diagrams
A scatter diagram is a graph that shows the relationship between two variables. Scatter diagrams can demonstrate a relationship between any element of a process, environment, or activity on one axis and a quality defect on the other axis.
Cause-and-effect diagrams
Cause-and-effect diagrams are also known as fishbone diagrams, why-why diagrams, or Ishikawa diagrams. This type of diagram breaks down the causes of the problem statement identified into discrete branches, helping to identify the main or root cause of the problem.
Histograms
Histograms show a graphical representation of numerical data. Histograms can show the number of defects per deliverable, a ranking of the cause of defects, the number of times each process is noncompliant, or other representations of project or product defects.
Continual improvement
The plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle is the basis for quality improvement as defined by Shewhart and modified by Deming.
Cost of quality (COQ)
The cost of quality (COQ) associated with a project consists of one or more of the following costs:
Prevention costs. Costs related to the prevention of poor quality in the products, deliverables, or services of the specific project.
Appraisal costs. Costs related to evaluating, measuring, auditing, and testing the products, deliverables, or services of the specific project.
Failure costs (internal/external). Costs related to nonconformance of the products, deliverables, or services to the needs or expectations of the stakeholders.
