Prepare for your Project Quality Planning interview with these questions covering key concepts, tools, and processes for ensuring quality in projects. Click on questions to view detailed answers.
Quality Assurance (QA) is about preventing mistakes. It focuses on the *process* of how things are done to ensure quality. It's proactive and aims to build quality into the process itself.
Quality Control (QC) is about finding and fixing mistakes. It focuses on the *product* or *deliverable* to ensure it meets quality standards. It's reactive and aims to identify defects after they occur.
Design of Experiments (DOE) is a statistical method used to determine the relationship between factors affecting a process and its output. In project quality planning, DOE helps in optimizing processes and identifying critical variables that influence quality.
Role in Quality Planning:
Example: In concrete production, DOE could be used to study how different proportions of cement, sand, aggregate, and water affect concrete strength and workability. This helps in designing a mix that consistently meets strength requirements while being easy to place.
DOE is a powerful tool for proactive quality planning, moving beyond simple trial-and-error to a more scientific approach for achieving robust quality.
Cost of Quality (COQ) analysis categorizes and measures the costs associated with maintaining or failing to maintain quality. It helps project managers make informed decisions about how much to invest in quality activities during planning.
COQ Categories:
How it Informs Planning:
A Quality Audit is a structured, independent review to determine if project activities comply with organizational and project policies, processes, and procedures. While it's part of Quality Assurance (performing the quality processes), its findings directly feed back into Quality Planning.
Role in Quality Management:
Feedback to Quality Planning:
Establishing a "culture of quality" means making quality a core value that everyone on the project team understands and commits to. It starts during the quality planning phase and requires more than just documents; it needs active leadership and involvement.
Steps to Establish a Culture of Quality in Planning:
Statistical Process Control (SPC) is a method of using statistical techniques to monitor and control a process. Its role in proactive quality planning and management is to ensure that processes are stable and predictable, thereby consistently producing high-quality outputs.
Role in Proactive Quality Planning & Management: