Project Quality Management in Practice

Table of Contents

1. Quality Management: An Organisational Perspective

2. Project Definition

3. Customer and Supplier Identification

4. Product Definition

5. Elicit and Establish Customer Requirements

6. Quality Planning - Define Metrics and Acceptance Criteria

7. Quality Planning - Establish the Quality Effort and Cost of Quality

8. Quality Assurance

9. Quality Control

10. Reflection

References

1. Quality Management: An Organisational Perspective

Enwon Australia Pty Ltd is a civil construction company in Sydney delivering concrete services to government agencies, major civil companies and other customers across New South Wale. The company has civil construction and maintenance experience, carrying out all services in-house backed up with third-party accredited systems. In fact, for the last two decades, Enwon Australia Pty Ltd has specialized in guttering and kerb, car park construction, rural driveways, and other civil works. The company is dedicated to accomplishing and surpassing local government and (Roads and Maritime Services) RMS standards for both safety and quality.

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Table 1: Critical Success Factors.

The above critical success factors in line with the organisation's vision and mission, which is to provide clients with impeccable quality, safety, and timeliness when completing our projects. By doing so, the gratification of our clients is increased, and the company is encouraged to continue offering service of the highest quality standards for a price that is competitive and reasonable.

2. Project Definition

The most basic component of project management is breaking the project into manageable and straightforward elements. Every successful project must start with a precise description of requirements, goals, deliverables and overall objective (Pine et al. 2010).

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Table 2 : Product Scope from the Perspective of the Company

3. Customer and Supplier Identification

The client is Ipoh Property Pty Limited, Level 4: Queen Victoria Building 455 George Street, Sydney, SW 2000, who would like a new car park constructed in September 2018. At the same time, Ipoh Property Pty Limited would like one of the old car park in the similar location to be reconstructed once the new parking lot is completed.

The internal suppliers to this project in Enwon Australia Pty Ltd comprise:

Human Resource Department: This internal supplier is crucial in ensuring that the project is successful. It will primarily focus on personnel recruitment, organization, and management of the given project. Its function begins with defining core competencies which are vital requirements, to team building and motivation.

Engineering Department: It will be in charge for the development of the entire project. This encompasses carrying out investigation and survey, analysis, designing the construction and resolving all technical problems during the project. Besides, the department will be responsible for the organization and delivery of materials and equipment for the requirements of the construction project.

4. Product Definition

The project is meant to address the lack of parking space that has become a problem at the Queen Victoria Building. The final deliverable is an efficient, advanced and safe car park that is large enough to accommodate more than 50 vehicles.

Interim Products:

According to Basu (2013), an interim deliverable is a transitional product generated before the final deliverable. In this project, there are various interim products.

Conceptual Design – This involves the proposed schedule of the project from its initiation to completion. The design requires to be satisfactory, professional sketch demonstrating the whole parking including two segments or heights and a three-D drawing.

Site clearance – Any obstruction, including the bumps and disposed of garbage, will be removed. The pits or garbage dump requires to be bake filled with designated earth material and well compacted. The elements removed from the site should be disposed of appropriately as required by the state and local development standards.

Grading the site – This involves ensuring a level base and adjusting the elevation of the surface around the construction site. The general area needs to be flat and level in line with the adjacent building or places.

Placing formwork and reinforcement for concrete – Placement of the concrete cover and reinforcing it with steel to achieve the appropriate quality of the designated surface. The reinforcing steel needs to be secured to prevent displacement during concrete placement and other construction activities.

5. Elicit and Establish Customer Requirements

A focused and detailed analysis of requirements is essential in the project management. The requirements of a project can be defined as the tasks or conditions that must be accomplished to ensure the successful completion of the project (Pine at al. 2010). Requirements can be categorized as either functional – describing what the product will do; or non-functional – describing the components of a product. In fact, the requirements offer a clear depiction of the work that must be done in a specific project. They are intended to align with the available resources as well as the objectives of the company (Mubarak, 2010).

Stakeholders’ needs are the basis for defining customer requirements. As such, the stakeholder needs are analyzed, coordinated, developed, and particularized for interpretation of customer requirements. Basu (2013) asserts that stakeholder needs, constraints, and expectations are poorly identified in most cases due to lack of an appropriate process. It is recommended, therefore, that projects should use an iterative process to develop customer requirements. In the iterative process, the requirements are repeatedly evaluated to make sure the plan and execution of the solution are going to result in preferred deliverable (Gujja and Wakta 2015).

Eliciting the customer requirements goes beyond gathering needs by proactively recognizing additional needs not offered by stakeholders (Gjorv, 2013). The standard techniques for eliciting customer requirements include surveys, interviews, scenarios, operational walkthroughs, observation, interim project reviews, use cases, and reverse engineering. In more complicated projects, workshops may be used, and brainstorming can offer a wide range of customer requirements. When the project scope is not clear, scale models or prototypes can be used to evaluate customer satisfaction.

Even in the cases where customer requirements are precise, wide-ranging and effective, as a project is initiated, changes have to occur. Studies have shown that including, changing, removing some requirements highly affect the estimated costs (Wysocki 2012). A formal management process of requirements such as the iterative process, will enable reduce cost, and ascertain end-to-end traceability. Nevertheless, the project might change and flexibility is required to cope with the changes while focusing on the provision of strengths to customers as rapidly as possible.

Eliciting product requirements in Enwon Australia Pty Ltd involves several stages:

First and foremost, the potential clients are allowed to view some previously constructed car parks on the company website and identify characteristics they find desirable and appealing. Secondly, questionnaires and surveys are used to determine what the customer likes and what they want the project to be carried out. Thirdly, the company contacts the potential clients through the details provided during the survey, so that we can comprehensively discuss the requirements, schedule, resources, and impact of the project. Fourth, the detailed customer requirements are used to design the car park in the form of high quality, professional plan view drawing. Last but not the least, the design is implemented after the customer, and the relevant agencies approve it.

A Requirements Traceability Matrix ((Pine at al. 2010) will help understand the requirements established for the final product from the customer.

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Table 3 : Requirements Traceability Matrix

The implied requirements were based on the fact that the client requires an extensive car park which can accommodate more than 50 vehicles and at the same time does not hinder the movement or activities of people accessing the site.

6. Quality Planning - Define Metrics and Acceptance Criteria

Quality planning is the process of identifying the necessary quality standards that need to be considered in the project and determining how to observe them (Wysocki 2012).

A metric refers to any aspect that can measure some quantifiable element of performance. Such aspect can be collected through observation, like pointing out the number of defects in a construction site, or through cost performance index (CPI) (Masters and Frazier 2007). On the other hand, acceptance criteria is a definite and clear set of project requirements that must be achieved and accepted by the client. The success or failure of the project relies on the client's perceived or documented acceptance criteria. Having a precisely determined set of acceptance criteria increases the possibility to meet the client's anticipations and lay the basis for their perception of the completed project (Wilson 2015).

In a nutshell, metrics are used to guide project managers make the appropriate decisions as regards the project they are managing. The types of metrics are based on the kind of technologies and methodologies used in the project. This ensures that the actual depiction of the project is given using the proper metric. Since the aspect of quality depends on the customer, it may be completely biased (Rose 2014). However, based on diverse perspectives, quality can be regarded as objective. This involves dividing quality into particular aspects, which in this case, are referred to the metrics.

It is very challenging to enhance the quality of project deliverables or efficiency of the processes if metrics have not been gathered. Metrics, as Basu (2013) emphasize, give some indication of the quality level and whether quality is increasing or decreasing. Besides determining the quality level of a project, metrics provide objective criteria to know whether or not the project was generally successful. It can be considered as the project scorecard.

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