Many people find quality management to be one of the more difficult project management processes to implement. This is because quality is hard to define, and formal quality management requires you to collect metrics to validate the state of quality. The following process will help create a framework for the quality management process.

1. Create a Quality Management Plan

Develop a Quality Management Plan to identify the major deliverables, completeness and correctness criteria, quality control activities and quality assurance activities. The Quality Management Plan also describes how you will ensure that the client’s quality requirements are achieved. It is the place to describe the processes and activities that will be put into place to ensure that quality deliverables are produced.

2. Determine the customer requirements for quality

Work with your customer to determine their requirements for quality. The high-level characteristics of quality can be uncovered during the project definition process. The detailed quality requirements should be uncovered when you gather business requirements.

3. Define a set of metrics to validate quality requirements are met

Identify a set of metrics that will provide insight into the quality of the deliverables. The project manager should already be capturing overall financial and duration metrics. The quality-related metrics need to be more sophisticated. There are two areas where you are trying to manage quality – in your project work processes and in the actual deliverables you are building. You should try to capture metrics that will measure each.

4. Execute quality control activities

Quality control refers to activities that validate the quality of your deliverables. It is also referred to as “inspection”. Ensure that the quality control activities for every deliverable are performed while the project is underway.

5. Execute quality assurance activities

Quality assurance refers to the processes used to build deliverables. It is also referred to as “prevention”. Having good processes should results in good quality deliverables.

6. Monitor and resolve deliverable quality

You need to validate the quality of your deliverables on an ongoing basis. When quality problems are found, implement a process to determine the cause and to make improvements in the process.

Using this process will help you understand, plan for and manage the state of quality on your project.

Have you ever been asked how far along you were on a project? Of course you have. If you do not have a valid schedule, or if you are not keeping the schedule up-to-date, you know that your answer is pretty much a guess. If you have a good schedule and you are keeping it up-to-date, you should have a sense for how much work is remaining and what the projected end-date is. But are you 50% complete? Or 90% complete? It is not always easy to know.

Earned value metrics were established to remove the guess work from determining where you are at in relation to a baseline. Using it allows a project manager to know precisely how far along he is, how much work is remaining, what the expected cost will be, and all sorts of other interesting information.

Are you using earned value on your project today? Probably not. You are not using earned value because your organization has not adopted it. Implementing earned value on your project requires a tremendous level of discipline and a common set of processes. It is hard to apply earned value one project at a time, since no one else would understand what you are doing and why. It required an organization focus.

History

Earned value has not been around for hundreds of years. You can actually trace its beginning to the late 1800s and early 1900s, as managers attempted to make the factory floor and the production line as efficient as possible. The drive for efficiency requires a foundation in metrics and earned value was a way to measure things more precisely.

In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense began to mandate the use of earned value on defense related projects. As you might expect, if the government is contracting out projects worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, they want project progress updates to consist of more than “we seem to be on target.” Earned value calculations can provide a better sense for exactly where the project is against the baseline and provide an early warning if the trends indicate that the project would be overbudget or over its deadline.

EVM is based on just three core values.

• Actual cost (AC). The actual cost of work completed as of a point in time.
• Planned Value (PV). The budgeted cost of work you planned to complete as of the same point in time.
• Earned Value (EV). The budgeted cost of the work actually completed as of the same point in time.

Earned Value is calculated by adding up the budgeted cost of every activity that has been completed. (Remember, this is not the actual cost of the work activities. This is thebudgeted cost.) Look at the following example:

 Today’s Date is March 31

Let’s say that as of March 31 you have actually completed activity A, B, C and D. Let’s calculate AC, PV and EV.

• AC is the actual cost of the work completed. This is 55 (20 + 5 + 20 + 10).
• PV is the budgeted cost of the work planned to be completed. This is 45 (20 + 10 + 15). Note that Activity D is not counted since it was not planned to be completed as of March 31.
• EV is the budgeted cost of the work completed. This is 50 (20 + 10 + 15 + 5).

These three numbers seem to be interesting, but by themselves they do not tell you too much. So, we need to combine and compare the values to determine our status against schedule and budget. Sorry, but this next bit of information must wait until next week’s email.