Plan Quality is one of the 42 project management processes described in the fourth edition PMBOK®. It’s one of the three Quality area processes, and one of the twenty Planning processes—which should not be difficult to remember with its name. The purpose of this process is to decide what quality requirements and standards should apply to the project and develop a plan (Quality Management Plan) to assure compliance with them. The Scope Baseline includes acceptance criteria for the project which is especially useful in the development of the Quality Management Plan.
The quality processes contain many tools and techniques. In fact, after listing Cost-Benefit Analysis, Cost of Quality, Control Charts, Benchmarking, Design of Experiments, Statistical Sampling, Flowcharting, and Proprietary Quality Management Methodologies as tools and techniques of this process, “Additional Quality Planning Tools” is listed. See earlier posting of Control Chart (posted February 17, 2009). The Cost of Quality technique examines costs of conformance (prevention and appraisal costs) and nonconformance (internal and external failure costs). The primary output of this process is the Quality Management Plan, which describes how the conformance to the selected quality standards will occur. The Quality Management Plan is then used to guide the other two quality processes—Perform Quality Assurance and Perform Quality Control.
January 28th, 2011 → 8:43 am
[...] The Cause-and-Effect Diagram is a method to uncover potential root causes of a given problem. They are also called Ishikawa Diagrams and Fishbone Diagrams, and were developed by Kaoru Ishikawa. It is listed as a tool and technique of the fourth edition PMBOK®’s Perform Quality Control process. Large arrows represent categories of reasons for the cause of the effect. The classic categories were the six “M’s” – Machine, Method, Maintenance, Materials, Man and Mother Nature. However, the categories can be adopted to fit the current problem. To the left is an example of a cause-and-effect diagram for Anna, who has burned batches of cookies lately. Notice that a smaller arrow provides a cause for the larger arrow to which it is pointing. [...]