Project Quality Management



Project Quality Management

Answer Key

1. A. Establish a basic set of quality system standards

ISO 9000'5 primary purpose is to provide a basic set of quality system requirements necessary to consistently produce products that meet customer expectations. These standards may be expanded to build a quality management program tailored to a specific organization.

Schmauch 1994,

2. B. Inevitable

Traditional thinking on quality held that human beings make mistakes; accordingly, the cost to secure zero defects would be significantly greater than the value of achieving "perfection."

Crosby 1985,76

3. C. Action taken to bring a nonconforming item into compliance

An output of the quality control process, rework is a frequent cause of project overruns in most application areas. The project team must make every reasonable effort to control and minimize rework.

PMI 1996, 92

4. A. Provide better product definition and product development

Quality function deployment helps a design team to define, design, manufacture, and deliver a product or service to meet or exceed customer needs. Its main features are to capture the customer's requirements, ensure cross-functional teamwork, and link the main phases of product development-product planning, part deployment, process planning, and production planning.

Soin 1992, 42 and 43

5. D. PERT chart

A PERT chart is a graphical representation of the tasks or activities required to complete a project. Its primary purpose is to help develop the project's schedule.

Willborn and Cheng 1994,49

6. D. Satisfying the needs of the project

Quality management includes all the management activities that determine the quality policy, objectives, and responsibilities and that implement them, by means such as quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement, within the quality system.

PMI 1996, 83

7. c. Use statistical techniques to compute a "loss function" to determine the cost of producing products that fail to achieve a target value

The Taguchi method is used to estimate the loss associated with controlling or failing to control process variability. It is based on the principle that by carefully selecting design parameters to produce robust designs, an organization can produce products that are more forgiving and tolerant. The tool helps to determine the value or break-even point of improving a process to reduce variability.

Mansir and Schacht 1988, 4-86 through 4-95

All the above

Types of quality audits include internal and external; system, product, process, location, and organization; baseline and regular; and special and comprehensive. Quality audits should be viewed as a system of audits.

Willborn and Cheng 1994,143

All the above

Fishbone diagrams and Ishikawa diagrams are cause-and-effect diagrams. They, along with system or process flowcharts, show how various elements of a system relate. All these tools are important in helping a project team anticipate or solve quality problems that may occur so that approaches can be developed to deal with them.

PMI 1996, 86 and 87

10. D. Reliability and maintainability

Availability is the probability of a product's being capable of performing as a required function under the specified conditions. The combination of mean-time-between-failure and mean-time-to-repair affects the availability of a given piece of equipment. In some environments, reliability, maintainability, and availability are treated as a single design function.

Ireland 1991, 11-3 and 11-4

11 .e. A quality assurance and control department reporting to senior management

Top management should provide constancy of purpose so that it can be infused throughout the organization. Constancy of purpose also requires a shared belief among organization members that management's

behavior clearly signals its commitment to and support of achievement of the vision. Quality assurance and control are functions that must be performed by everyone, not just by those assigned to specific departments.

Mansir and Schacht 1988, 3-4 and 3-5

12. B. Different concepts because grade pertains to entities with the same functional use but different quality requirements

Low quality is always a problem, whereas low grade may not be. For example, a software product may be high quality, with no obvious bugs and a readable manual, but low grade because it has a limited number of features. Or the product may be low quality, with many bugs and poor documentation, but high grade because it has numerous features. The project team must determine and deliver the required levels of both quality and grade.

PMI 1996, 84

13. B. Nonconformance to the requirement

Juran, Crosby, and others believe that the management of any organization recognizes the real value of total quality management only when the lack of quality is quantified in monetary terms.

Crosby 1985, 85

14. A. Plan is prepared for individual products, projects, services, or contracts

The quality system describes quality assurance as that process used throughout the organization. Both the quality plan and the quality system must be properly integrated into the overall management of the organization.

Willborn and Cheng 1994,138

15. E. All the above

Project team members should have a working knowledge of statistical quality control, particularly sampling and probability, to help them evaluate quality control output.

PMI 1996, 89

16. C. Measure products, services, and processes against those of other organizations

By benchmarking products, services, and processes against those of leading-edge organizations, companies gain knowledge that is useful in promoting change within their own organizations.

Soin 1992, 33 and 34

17. B. Quality is the concern of middle management and the quality supervisor .

Quality concerns all levels of management and staff. Responsibilities for quality are assigned to top management as well as to all workers.

Willborn and Cheng 1994, 13 and 17

18. C. Quality improvement

This process increases the effectiveness and efficiency of the project and provides added benefits to the project stakeholders.

PMI 1996, 89

19. D. Equal to cost and schedule

Project management is an exercise in trade-offs among cost, schedule (time), and quality (scope). Any change in one affects the other two. The reality of the marketplace dictates a practical approach to project management. Therefore, when evaluating alternatives, a project manager must consider quality equal to the other two constraints.

Frame 1995, 6 and 7

20. E. All the above

The stability provided through long-term contracts permits better planning and encourages better communication between the buyer and seller. Vendors with long-term relationships are generally more inclined to invest in process and quality improvement because they have a higher probability of recovering their costs. Long-term contracting with fewer vendors also reduces buyer-related costs by simplifying accounting, collections, and other administrative tasks.

Mansir and Schacht 1988, 4-11

21. D. Provides objective evidence about nonconformance

Although all the features listed pertain to quality audits, ISO 10011 {Guidelines for Auditing Quality Systems) describes the main feature of a quality audit as providing objective evidence of nonconformance. The information obtained from a quality audit can be used to improve quality

systems and performance.

Willborn and Cheng 1994,

22. C. Project team

Because of the large number of stakeholders on each project, informing them of the quality policy is the responsibility of the entire project team, rather than the project manager or anyone individual. The quality policy includes the overall intentions and direction of the organization with regard to quality, as formally expressed by top management.

PMI 1996, 85

23. E. All the above

Management reviews determine status, progress, problems, and solutions. Peer reviews are used to evaluate work done and address specific problems. Competency center reviews are conducted by organizations with a reputation for excellence in a specific area and are used to document, study, and propose technical solutions to problems. Fitness reviews and audits are measures to determine the fitness of a product or part of a project.

Ireland 1991, VI-6 and VI-7

24. D. Power of customers as stakeholders in the process

As organizations have striven to gain customer approval, customers' expectations have increased. Project quality management is a way to ensure that customer requirements are met or exceeded.

Frame 1995, 55

25. B. Top management

Top management leads the effort to stimulate creativity, pride, teamwork, and the quest for knowledge. Top management should seek to create an integrated effort working toward improving performance at every level and in every activity.

Mansir and Schacht 1988, 1-8

26. A. Customer

The customer sets the requirements and plays an important role in project quality during reviews and at key milestones in the schedule.

Ireland 1991, VI-4 through VI-6

27. A. Activities in the quality system designed to provide confidence that the project will satisfy relevant quality standards

Quality assurance is a managerial function that establishes processes or procedures in an organization or project to assist in determining whether quality standards are being met. For example, management may prescribe that a quality audit be conducted at the end of every major phase in a project. The audit would then become a part of the quality assurance system in the organization.

PMI 1996, 88 and 89

28. D. Evaluate failure modes and causes associated with the design and manufacture of a new product

This technique is a method of analyzing design reliability. A list of potential failure modes is developed for each component, and then each mode is given a numeric rating for frequency of occurrence, criticality, and probability of detection. These data are used to assign a risk priority number for prioritizing problems and guiding the design effort.

Soin 1992,157-159

29. A. Identify which variables have the most influence on overall outcomes

The technique is usually applied to a product as opposed to a service. For example, automotive designers might want to determine which combination of suspension and tires would produce the most desirable ride characteristics at a reasonable cost.

PMI 1996, 86 and 87

30. B. just-in-time concept

The Kanban technique helps to control the flow of material. It uses tags; status display boards; small, designated material-transfer spaces; dedicated containers; and similar mechanisms to give better visibility

and control to the flow of material. It reinforces the just-in-time demand. based system for material flow by limiting the quantity of material that may be held to the amount calculated as appropriate for just-in-time processi ng.

Mansir and Schacht 1988, 4-90 and 4-91

31. A. Result does or does not conform

An attribute is a quality characteristic that either is met or is not met and, therefore, cannot be measured on a continuous scale. For example, a

coin has only two sides, heads and tails, which are its two attributes.

PMI 1996, 89

32. C. A framework for quality systems

ISO 9000 provides a basic set of requirements for a quality system, without specifying the particulars for implementation.

Schmauch 1994, 6-10

33. D. Incremental improvement

Imai, a Japanese engineer, coined the word Kaizen to describe an approach to quality that means making small improvements every time a process is repeated.

Imai 1986, 3

34. E. The procedures used to conduct trade-off analyses among cost, schedule, and quality

A part of the overall project plan, the quality management plan should address all aspects of how quality management will be implemented on the project rather than focusing on one or two specific areas of continuous improvement. Trade-off analyses are business judgments and, as such, are not procedural steps to be included in the quality management plan.

PMI 1996, 87

35. C. An organization as a whole

A third-party accredited registrar assesses an organization's quality system to determine whether it conforms to the 1509000 standards.

Schmauch 1994, 5

36. A. Show how many results were generated, by type or category of identified cause

A Pareto diagram is a histogram ordered by frequency of occurrence. Rank ordering is then used to guide corrective action. The Pareto diagram is conceptually related to Pareto's Law, which holds that a relatively small number of causes typically will produce a large majority of the problems or defects.

PMI 1996, 90 and 91

37. B. Seven consecutive points are ascending, descending, or the same

Consecutive points on a process control chart that are ascending, descending, or the same indicate an abnormal trend in the process and must be investigated.

Ireland 1991, V-6

38. C. Does not require 100% inspection of the elements to achieve a satisfactory inference of the population

The application of the statistical concept of probability has proven, over many years in many applications, that an entire population of products need not be inspected, if the sample selected conforms to a normal distribution of possible outcomes (the "bell" curve).

PMI 1996, 90

39. A. Monitor process variation over time

Used to monitor process variation and to detect and correct changes in process performance, the statistical control chart helps people understand and control their processes and work.

Mansir and Schacht 1988, 4-73

40. E. All the above

Both quality management and project management recognize that understanding, managing, and influencing customer expectations are necessary to meet or exceed them; prevention of error is less costly than correction; participation of all team members is required for success, with management providing the resources needed to succeed; and the processes within the project phases, such as the plan-do-check-act process, are crucial management tools or techniques.

PMI 1996, 84 and 85

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