ASSESSMENT 1: REFLECTING ON DEFIECNCIESASSOCIATED WITH PROJECT QUALITY MANAGEMENT
Student first name, Student Surname, student ID
Abstract—This assignment brief gives you guidelines for preparing your report for the first assignment of Project Quality Management (PQM) unit.
Index Terms—About four key words or phrases in alphabetical order, separated by commas.
I.INTRODUCTION
The body of knowledge around Project Quality Management (PQM) is full of unverified propositions and hypotheses. Accordingly, the PQM unit aims to enable you to pick the most suitable theory from the broader literature available about ‘management’ and ‘quality management’ and successfully adopt the selected theory to address challenges you encounter in the real-world projects you are involved in. Assignment 1 is therefore designed to give you the opportunity to examine a quality management related hypothesis in the context of authentic projects and reflect on the outcomes.
II.Assignment Development
A.Assignment Rationales
This assignment is intended to help you:
- Achieve a deeper level of learning through scientific analysis of a PQM-relevant topic,
- Make the learning experience more personal and relevant by linking it to your own work and life experiences, and
- Develop your skills in writing in a reader-focused way.
B.Assignment Detail
To begin addressing the assignment, you need to come up with a hypothesis based on your perception regarding PQM. An easy way to develop a hypothesis is to find a problem, first. Any issue in the context of PQM is an avenue to define a hypothesis. For example, one can always question the cost associated with enhancing project quality. After thorough study of the literature it leads to a hypothesis expressing that ‘The cost of ensuring quality in a medium size software development project is remunerated within in the same time period spent on programming the software in terms of 50% less requests to resolve the errors.’ Of course, any project from your daily work or life which has the potential for quality improvement can be used to define a hypothesis. The second step is to design a scientifically sound methodology to test your hypothesis. Methods you are encouraged to implement include but are not limited to: a) Observation, b) measurement c) calculation, d) statistical analysis, e) simulation, f) self-reflection andg) consulting with colleagues/experts. Finally, you need to discuss your findings and comment about validity of the hypothesis you have investigated. Students are welcome to select from the potential topics presented in appendix A but they need to reflect their profound knowledge about the selected statement and its significance. Please note that the provided statements must be revised to clearly represent a hypothesis and match the requirements of the specific problem it highlights in the PQM domain.
C.Submission information
Assignment 1 is due on midnight of the Friday of the week 7. Your report must be developed using this template and be submitted through designated Turnitindropbox accessible on Blackboard. The maximum allowable word count is 2500 words excluding graphics, tables, references and appendixes.
III.Marking Criteria
The total possible mark for this assignment is 40 points out of 100 available points for the unit. Demonstrated in Table 1, are the criteria and their associated weight.
TABLE I: TheMarking rubric
Criterion / Weight / ExpectationAppropriate title / 5% / The title must clearly represent the focus area of the report while attract potential readers’ attention.
Practicality / 5% / Selected hypothesis must cover a significant issue in PQM domain and the results must facilitates decision making on that particular matter.
Methodology / 10% / A sound and robust approach must be followed to assure the reliability of the findings. The selected method must be suitable for testing the proposed hypothesis.
Critical analysis / 30% / Examples and comparisons are essential to avoid a superficial analysis.
Demonstrated knowledge / 20% / Student’s dominance on the selected topic must be demonstrated by providing enough details about the multiple aspects of the studied issue.
Linkage between collected data and final outcomes / 15% / Results must be grounded on analysis carried out on the data collected for the purpose of rejecting/accepting the hypothesis. In other words, the same analysis on the same set of data must result in the identical outcomes.
Professional presentation / 15% / This includes editing, layout, proofreading and English, referencing, meeting word count, as well as the structure of the report. Readability also contributes to the professional presentation.
IV.Conclusion
This assignment is designed to portray how the context of application impacts the effectiveness of specific quality management strategies. Students, through examining selected hypothesis, will experience the dynamics of generating ‘facts’ in regards to PQM. The skills students develop by completing this assignment significantly improve their impact as a project manager by demonstrating how data collected from their project can be used to pick the most suitable quality management paradigm in order to assure conformance and compliance of the project outcome.
Appendix A
Series of statements are provided here that can be used to initiate a proper investigation path. Please consider that contradictory to a statement, generic terms are replaced by explicit adjectives when populating a hypothesis. In other words, while statement summaries the main point of a study the hypothesis reveals the details that must be examined. For example statement (a) below talks about a definition to be reasonable but it doesn’t differentiate whose view point is this and how many of the target population agree with the definition. The statement can be converted to a hypothesis like this “more than 80% of engineers involved in the design of the project define quality as meeting customer requirements.”
a. Meeting the customer requirements is a reasonable definition of quality,
b. Customer satisfaction means we can wrap up our projects more rapidly (Frame 2002),
c. Not doing it right the first time at every stage of the process, essentially, is the cause of failures and problems in the production of products and services (Oakland 2003),
d. Excellent communication between customers and suppliers is the key to total quality performance (Oakland 2003),
e. It is always cheaper to do it right the first time (Crosby in Beckford 1998),
f. If all employees are to participate in making the company or organisation successful…then they must also be trained in the basics of disciplined management (Oakland 2003),
g. All employees must be committed to quality in order for an organisation to achieve sustained improvement (Oakland 2003),
h. A strong competitive advantage…provides direction and motivation to the entire organisation (Evans 2005),
i. It is better to work together with a supplier to remove problems, improve capability, and generate a mutual understanding of “real” requirements, than to hop from one supplier to another and thereby experience a different set of problems each time (Oakland 2003),
j. Everything we experience in or from and organisation is the result of a design decision, or lack of one (Oakland 2003),
k. Customer expectations are rarely well defined and may well evolve as the transaction progresses (AS 3906),
l. as suppliers, all employees need to identify their internal and external customers, their specific needs and suitable measures of satisfaction (AS3906),
m. In the organisation that is to succeed over the long term, performance must begin to be measured by the improvements seen by the customer (Oakland 2003),
n. The only performance measurement is the cost of quality, which is the expense of non-conformance (Crosby 1979 in Sower and Quarles 2003), and
o. It is the “internal” cost of lack of quality that lead to the claim that approximately one-third of our efforts are wasted” (Oakland 2003).
References
Frame, J. D. 2002. The new project management: tools for an age of rapidchange. 2nd ed, The Jossey-BassBusiness & Management Series. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.
Oakland, J. S. 2003. Total Quality Management: text with cases. 3rd ed.Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Beckford, J. 1998. Quality: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Evans, J. R. 2005. Total Quality Management, Organisation, and Strategy. 4th ed. Mason, Ohio: SouthWestern.
AS3906- 2004.Qualityofservice- Guidetocustomerexpectations.Sydney:StandardsAustraliaInternational.
Sower, V. E., and R. Quarles. 2003. Cost of Quality: Why More Organisations Do Not Use It Effectively.