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Respond to post #3:

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Unit 3 DB
Project Management Capstone MPM430
Amy 
Professor Dr. Brett Gordon
Colorado Technical University
March 7, 2017
The project management office (PMO) director has requested the discussion of quality management and risk management in this week’s project manager meeting. The director has asked you to discuss both quality management and risk management in that meeting. 
Using the course textbooks and information from other sources, briefly discuss 3 quality management tools and techniques and 3 risk management strategies related to project management. 
Quality Management process group consist of three processes. The first is the plan quality management. The next process is perform quality assurance. The last of the process groups is perform quality control.
In the plan quality management process, a good tool to use is a flowchart. Flowcharts are simple to create and they will help you to maintain the management of the quality process to visualize the process. A flowchart will allow all of the project team members and stakeholders to visualize the activities that are broken down in the project. 
In performing quality assurance, a technique that can be utilized is quality audits. Audits will allow a project manager to assess the potential quality and risks of a specific activity in the project. A quality audit will increase the chance of detecting a quality flaw before it could become too detrimental to the project. Quality audits are time consuming but the benefits of potentially saving time, energy and cost are worth the additional time spent on audits. 
In performing quality management a resourceful tool to use is performance reviews. Conducting a performance review meeting will allow all parties to be evaluated but on an individual basis. This will allow for specific project team members to be able to make the most of their acquired skills. A personal development plan can also be created after the project is complete in order to assess how the performance in quality management took place during the project. Again, this will allow for guidance and support to be provided to the individuals who were involved in the performance quality management. 
The Risk Management Plan or RPM will give you an overview of you entire risk process. This is typically done in the planning phase of the project. This plan is typically generated by the project manager, along with the project team members as well as any other stakeholders who are involved in the project plan. What this risk management plan does, is that it attempts to predict potential risks to the project. The risk management plan can also help with assessing the implications of the potential risks as well as outlining a response the potential risks.
Identifying Risks is a strategy that almost everyone involved in the project can be a part of. This includes the testers, trainers and technical writers who are at times, excluded from a portion of the project. (PMI, 2016)A good tool to use when it comes to identifying risk is creating a checklist and going through one by one on the checklist as it relates to each specific department. Brainstorming is something that the project team can use to go over potential scenarios for risks or indications of risk. 
Monitoring and controlling risk is a strategy used to limit the amount of risk in a project. There are typically four ways to address risk in a project. These four ways are to mitigate the risk or limit it as much as possible, transfer to risk to someone else, avoid the risk or accept the risk. Once you have considered all of the potential risks, now you are able to move into the stage where you can monitor the risk and asses it as necessary as well as control the risk. This goes one step further than just monitoring the risk. You would want to go in and check to make sure that the risks that had been identified were addressed, fixed and now controlled to not potential come up again as a possible risk. 
Holt

Respond to post #4:

Unit 3- Discussion Board

Project success is dependent on the delicate balance in managing the constraints of time, money, scope and quality; all of which can be negatively impacted if the risk is not managed well (Verzuh, 2016). Well managed projects include mature, well-developed quality and risk management plans to ensure that the delicate balance mentioned is maintained and risk is managed through the life cycle of the project. This post will discuss some of the tools and techniques that are available to project managers to develop, monitor, and control these plans in a way that will help projects see a successful completion.

Quality management in projects include the processes and tasks that performed by the organization to ensure that project deliverables are up to the standards of and needs of the customer (Project Management Institute, 2013). Plan quality management involves the process that identifies and documents the quality requirements for the deliverables of projects; this can include which military specifications (mil. specs.) that will be used to ensure the quality of products produced for the Department of Defense and military or NASA specifications for manned space flight articles. After determining which quality requirements, specification, or standards are applicable to the project, it will be documented how the project will provide evidence of compliance with these quality requirements, standards, or specifications.

Plan quality management uses the tools and techniques that include cost benefit analysis and cost of quality which are used to guide the project team in the successful management and assurance of quality deliverables through the lifecycle of the project. The cost-benefit analysis is an activity where the project measures the cost of quality to the expected benefit. The costs of quality are broken into two categories (1) cost of performance and (2) cost of nonconformance. The cost of conformance includes prevention costs of training document processes, equipment, and time to do it right; and appraisal costs include testing, destructive testing loss, and inspections. While the cost of nonconformance includes internal failure costs of rework and scrap; and external failure costs of liabilities, warranty work, and loss of business. Therefore, the benefits of performing projects tasks and delivering a quality product are less rework, higher productivity, lower costs, increased stakeholder satisfaction, and increased profitability (Project Management Institute, 2013).

Perform quality assurance is the process of inspecting the quality requirements and the quality control measurement results to guarantee that the required quality requirements, standards, and specifications are being met. Quality assurance contributes the certainty that the project deliverables meet quality requirements, standards, and specifications by inspecting out preventing defects during the planning process and inspecting out defects during work performance during the implementation phase (Project Management Institute, 2013). For example, the quality plan determines that electrical connections on a manned flight vehicle, such as the shuttle need to have these connections torqued to thirty-five inch ounces per table 5 of NASA-Spec-2568S, and this torque must be witnessed by Boeing’s quality assurance and NASA quality (DCMA) and documented in the project quality metrics documents. This verifies that the requirement for torque was understood, performed, and documented with the required witnesses to ensure that the quality requirements were met.

Perform quality assurance uses many tools and techniques to ensure that quality is being maintained some of these tools are affinity diagrams and prioritization matrices (Project Management Institute, 2013). Affinity diagrams are very much like mind maps and can be used to help give structure to the WBS when decomposing the scope during planning processes. Affinity diagrams are useful during brainstorming sessions; however, they have minimal benefit if used for less that fifteen decision points (SparkKD, 2013). For example, a small project with less than fifteen tasks would not benefit from the use of an affinity diagram; which is most useful in situations where the information discussed is large and confusing in nature. Prioritization matrices identify key issues and determine suitable alternatives for prioritization as a set of decisions to implement (Project Management Institute, 2013). For example, there is an issue with the placement of an electrical outlet for a dryer in a new home build where the available vent placement is over twenty feet away, priorities on what the real issue is the placement of the plug or vent and what is the best solution.

Project quality control assesses project work performance and suggests any required changes by monitoring and recording the results of quality activities of the project (Project Management Institute, 2013). The tools and techniques use in project quality control are inspection and approved change requests review. Inspection is a process for keeping nonconforming deliverables out of the hands of the customer by having them looked at to verify that they meet the documented quality requirements, standards, and specifications. Approved change requests review is the review of requested changes whether by the customer due to a needs change, the realization of a risk or a correction to the project plan to ensure the deliverable meets the scope and quality requirements of the customer to ensure that the change does not fall outside the scope or negatively impact the baseline budget or schedule.

All projects face some risk whether, from known or unknown sources, that is why risk management is a very important process for project managers to understand and become skilled at accomplishing. Project risk management includes identifying, planning for, analysis of, planned responses to, and controlling risk on a project (Project Management Institute, 2013). Project risk is an uncertain event that could have a positive or negative effect on the project if it is realized. The strategies for controlling negative risks are avoided, transfer, mitigate, or accept. Avoiding a risk is when the project team works to eliminate the risk entirely, this can include the reduction of project scope (Project Management Institute, 2013). Transferring risks includes actions where the risk is transferred to a third party by either subcontracting out work or purchasing an insurance policy. Mitigating risk involves the project team taking steps to reduce the impact of the risk by such means as adopting less complex processes such as the development of prototypes (Project Management Institute, 2013). Acceptance of risk is a strategy where a risk is known, and the impact or likelihood of occurrence is so minimal the project team simply decides not to do anything about the risk; such as a construction project in Florida during hurricane season.

Not all risk to projects is negative some risks will lead to benefits to the project or organization that could help lead to project success, gain in organizational reputation, or additional projects and contracts. The strategies for positive risks are exploited, enhance, share, and accept (Project Management Institute, 2013). Exploiting a risk ensures that the risk is realized by reducing that chances that the risk will not be realized so that the organization can gain the benefit from the risk. Enhancing a risk increases the likelihood that the risk will be realized so that the organization can benefit from the results. Sharing the risk is when some of the benefits from the realized risk are given to a third party such as those seen in some joint adventures such as the United Launch Alliance with Boeing and Lockheed. Accept for positive risk is the same as in negative risk where the project team simply does nothing about the risk.

The balance between the constraints of the budget, schedule, scope, and quality will ensure that a project is successfully completed to the stakeholder’s satisfaction. Project quality management is the use of quality tools and techniques to ensure that the project deliverables meet quality requirements, standards, and specifications sought by the customer. Project risk is a realization of uncertain events that can have a negative or positive impact on the project or the organization; therefore, managing risk is important for the successful completion of projects.