December 14 2022 at 04:00AM
Quality Metric Design as a Tool to Control The Quality of Project
1. Introduction
Defined in the book A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Sixth Edition, project is a temporary process in producing product or service with unique result (PMI, 2017). It has been determined from the initiating phase to closing phase. It can also be terminated by the customer if they want to end the project. Thus, project management is important in the deployment and construction of a project. Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to the overall project activity to meet the project requirements (PMI, 2017).
Quality is one of the project constraints which is known for project triangle constraints. Quality means the project deliverables are satisfying and meeting the customer or project owner expectation. According to PMBOK (PMI, 2017) there are three process that should be conducted by the project manager including creating project quality management plan, manage quality and control quality. Quality management plan is developing the standards, procedure, person who responsible in managing and controlling the quality, which methodology that will be used for quality process and many more. Manage quality is assuring the process of the project whether they use an effective of efficient process to produce the deliverable. Control quality means checking the deliverables against the project baseline. The main focus of this activity is the correctness of any deliverables (PMI, 2017).
The main output of the developing quality management plan is creating quality metric. Since quality is very important to the project and will be moment of the truth, translating the customer expectation to the more numerical and measurable indicator can help the project manager and project team stay on the right path. Quality metric is useful for both process such as manage quality and control quality. One of the simple example of the quality metric is “customer feedback of the project achieves more than 95% satisfying answer”.
The development of the quality metric will be implemented in one of the telecommunication project. The project owner is the largest and well know company in Indonesia. The project owner has been awarding the project to PT XYZ as the vendor who does the project. however, the vendor cannot meet the project due date. The project expands up to 3 months. The main issue why the project is delay is internal communication. The vendor didn’t know when the project begins since they don’t receive work order letter. As consequence, the vendor did nothing at the early stage. Now the vendor has received the work order. To minimize the delay, the owner is willing to give a quality metric when doing the project. This quality metric will assist the vendor when installing network element in the project on the right process.
There are few research talking about creating quality metric in detail. The best illustration of quality metric is using the “Internal Control” by Page (2010). This research talks how important the process know its possible error and how to handle it. By knowing the errors, we can do self- control about the process and minimizing all the error to be happened. The process of creating quality metric begin with listing the activity of the project and investigating the possible error in each activity. The closest research which discuss about auditing the project also developed by Pratami et.al (2015). However, the quality audit instrument is still need elaborated.
Design quality management also talked in the paper by Yan, et. al (2009). They developed quality metric based on Engineering Breakdown Structure (EBS) and Objective Breakdown Structure (OBS). They also used expert questionnaires and some interviews to deliver the design quality indicators based on the project life cycle (Yan et.al,
2009). This study also used Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) which can give the detail descriptions about the work packages that describe some activities or process. They measured quality performance by adopting WBS. Hence by combining study form Yan et.al (2009) and Page (2010) the quality metric is established. The project quality analysis
can be used to manage the effect of project performance differences between planning and implementation. In addition, the design of quality metrics can be used as lesson learned and improvements for similar projects in the future.
2. Methodology
The quality metrics identify the possible error every activity and give the critical success criteria. An activity can be separated form resources used including tools, documents, man, material, method, and its specification or function. The procedures used in this research are:
- Collecting data using interview to authorized project owner and documenting the documents such as Scope of Work (SOW), Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), WBS Dictionary, and project schedule using Critical Path Method (the longest path).
- Creating quality metric using internal control method. Then, checking the implementation result by using questionnaires.
- Implementing quality control
- Assessing the finding based on critical activity analysis. All the indicator in the quality metric is implemented and if the gap exists then investigate toward critical path activity.
Furthermore, implementing internal control method (Page, 2010) it is necessary to do some procedures as follow:
- Identifying the points on the business process that may be potential problem (error) that called as possible issue.
- Giving a warning or error sign if the error may occur.
- Interviewing the project team about potential problem, without asking the detail about preventive actions until all potential problems of activity have been identified.
- Investigating the preventive action for all those identified errors. Make sure the preventive action can be measured. This preventive action shall be included into critical success criteria for every process/acidity in the project.
- Documenting the quality metric into systematic as internal control table.
3. Research and Discussion
The basic data for creating quality metric is Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The WBS in Fiber Termination Management project consist of 4 main work packages including preparation, material delivery, installation and closing. The design of quality metrics is based on the possible error that has been obtained. In the quality metric there is critical success criteria which is a requirement that must be met for the successful activities. In addition, there are also resources for supporting the successful activities including tools/document, man, material, money, method.
Figure 1. WBS Level 1
To determine the longest path is applying critical path method, however the predecessor activity must be identified first. To determine the critical path, Microsoft Office Project has been selected as a tool to generate critical path. Critical path means the activity has no reserve time or no waiting time. If one activity is completed, then successor activity should be started on time. From figure 1, the critical path is indicated by red color and blue color shows non critical path activity. The CPM can be used to determine the root cause of the project delay by correlating the quality metric implementation. Quality metric is powerful tool to translate the expected project deliverable. Then after indicating the critical activity the next step is developing the quality metric at the lowest unit of WBS. Since the work package of the project consist of 26 group of activity and can be breakdown further into smallest level, we provide a brief quality metric design.
Table 2. Quality Metric of WBS Level 1 (Summary)
WBS Number | Task Title | Possible Error | Critical Success Criteria | Resources | ||||
Tools/Doc | Man | Material | Method | Specs/Func | ||||
1 |
Preparation |
|
|
Permission letter, ruler, APD, Survey Result, minute of meeting, Bill of quantity, APD, survey result, DRM |
Each party send at least one representative to handle this action. Survey should be conducted by at least 3 form vendor and 1 from owner who draw the APD |
AutoCAD software | Email, meeting, Focus Group Discussion, visiting site directly | Permission letter should be issued by owner however if vendor issue permission letter they should attached on behalf letter |
2 | Material Delivery |
|
|
Purchase order | Vendor | FTM Material, Grounding Material, Cable, Tray, Wire mesh, Fiber Duct Material | Direct Order | Purchase order in compliance with the delivery order |
LoM of Contract | Guidance in ordering material which is approved specifications by Telkom | |||||||
Delivery Order | Vendor and Partner representative (minimum 1 person) | Direct Checking and Observation | Official report about vendor's delivery material | |||||
3 | Installation |
|
|
APD, BA DRM, Manajemen core ATP (Acceptance Test Procedure Patchcord dummy, Lightsource, label data Optical power meter |
People who understand electricity at least 3 people as well as field supervisors Worker should have termination training and certification at least 3 people |
Patchcore, Grounding cable | Direct installment |
Dummy patchcord is used to help in CO and customer validation The entire system is installed based on specifications as follows:
|
4 | Closing |
|
A successful closing when all of the critical success criteria of acceptance test and BAST-1 activity are done. | measurement test form OTDR Comm Test, measurement test from Power Meter, lining test, Comm Test, Final BoQ, ABD, ATP checklist BAST-1 document | People who understand the agreement /contracts and order letters as well as historical contracts | Check and match UT and reconciliation documents, order letters, contracts and amendments if any |
The entire system is installed based on specifications as follows:
|
Quality control required tool and technique for example inspection by performing an audit. We conducted mini audit by using assessment of the implementation through questionnaires filled by project owner. The results of the implementation indicate that the project owner provides the level of importance of any statements contained in the quality metric and quality checklist. Implementation is done by giving limited answer “Yes” or “No” on every statement of critical success criteria and quality item. If the statement is already implemented, then filled with “Yes” answer and if the statement has not been implemented as a whole then filled with the answer “No”. There are 110 statements of critical success criteria for all level in WBS that included in quality metrics. It can be inferred that 84 out of 110 statements or equal to 76,36% statement of critical success criteria have been implemented. The remaining 26 out of 110 statements or 23,64% statement of critical success criteria is not yet implemented. To give more useful information we corelate the result form critical activity. For those unimplemented quality metric are belongs to ciritcal path then the project duration will get jeopardized. Logically, the activvity is highly possible to produce rework since the deliverable are no yet complied by the requierements. Rewrok can exrend the project duration because there are no float remains in the activity.There is 12 of 26 quality metric statement belongs to critical activity or equal to 46,15% statement in quality metric which is not implemented in the project. Thus, it will be one of the reaseon why this project is delay.
4. Conclusion
Firstly, it is important to get more familiar with the quality metric at planning phase. Quality metric have been created and produced 110 critical success criteria statements of all activities. Half of the critical success criteria were not implemented in this project especially those that lied on critical activity. Thus it strongly supported the cause of schedule overrun. Internal control method helps Project Manager of both party (owner and vendor) to decide the possible error of each activity then critical success criteria and its resource. Furthermore, since the project is in monitoring & controlling then the quality metric only focus on the correctness of the project deliverables. For further research we suggest to create quality metric based on execution phase which focus on the measurement of process effectiveness and efficiency.
References
- Project Management Institute, Project Management Body of Knowledge A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, Sixth Edit. Pennsylvania: Project Management Institute, 2017.
- L. Yan, M. Peng, and C. Qun, “Innovation of Design Quality Management Based on Project Life Cycle,” Concurr. Eng., p. 4 pp., 2009.
- D. Pratami, I. A. Puspita, and T. Sjafrizal, “Designing Internal Audit Process on Infrastructure Project in Indonesia Based on PMBOK 5th Edition,” ResearchGate, 2016.
- S. Page, Business Process Improvement. New York: AMACOM, 2010.
1This article is a conference paper submitted for The 9th International Conference on Sustainable Collaboration in Business, Technology, Information, and Innovation 2018 and published on ResearchGate.