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In this movie, we'll take a look at planning out Quality. Quality, something that many teams often fail to properly address, is an important part of project management, but in truth, many don't understand quality so let's define it. Quality refers to the degree to which the product of the project meets the requirements. You can say that it measures whether stakeholder expectations have been met. Through Quality we define how the requirements are considered to be satisfied and what the degree of tolerance is. Through the Quality planning process we'll identify quality standards for the project and then determine how the standards will be met. That means that not only will a quality management plan be generated out of this process but also quality metrics within the plan that define what the tolerance levels of the results are. In fact, I'll take a quick moment to further clarify what the contents of the quality management plan are according to CompTIA. The plan should contain quality metrics which define what will be measured and how; control limits which includes the range of acceptable results; and, frequency of measurement. It'll detail how quality assurance will be carried out. It'll also detail how quality control will be carried out and once approved, this will form the Quality Baseline. When putting the plan together you'll need to consider several things. First, you'll need to consider what the organization's quality policy and practices are. If you worked on several projects in the past within the organization, then you're likely familiar with it already. Another important element to consider are the various industry laws and regulations that impact quality standards. You'll need to be up to date with all of this information. These days, quality on a project management level tends to follow the concepts of modern quality. This reflects the practices of some influential quality theorists, such as Deming, Juran and Crosby. They believe that quality efforts should be carried out early on within the project during the planning phase in order to prevent or reduce defects from happening. That's different from simply making sure that you are running ongoing tests as a product is created. Although a place of greater amount of effort and time into these quality activities, the idea is that it will save you a great deal of time and money later by avoiding things like rework. There are several great Quality tools and programs out there these days, such as Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, ISO 9000, CMMI, just to name a few. Hopefully, the quality processes, including quality planning, will reflect some of these great methods. Back to planning out quality and putting the metrics and control limits together, there are several tools that you can use to determine how quality should be measured. A few that I'd like to address include Benchmarking, Flowcharting, considering cost of quality through Cost-benefit analysis. Those are the three that we'll focus on. With Benchmarking, we'll want to go outside of the organization if possible. What's the rest of the industry doing? What are their standards? And, are our own standards in line with theirs, better, or are we behind the curve? The idea is to have something to compare our project to. You can also look internally at other past projects for comparison. You're likely familiar with Flowcharts. Through Flowcharting we can get a sense of where within a process or system issues may arise. The reason is that we can see how various steps are interrelated and what leads up to a potential issue. Cost-benefit analysis is something that we looked at earlier when reviewing project selection methods. In terms of quality, we'll want to use cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the cost of quality activities will be worth the efforts. We don't need to necessarily perform a quality check on everything that we do, so this helps us determine where it makes the most sense. We'll weigh the costs to the benefits. When performing cost-benefit analysis you'll need to consider the upfront cost of quality. I'll call this the cost of conformance, which are the efforts placed into preventing errors from taking place. You'll need to consider cost of testing and the cost of failure, which includes things like rework, defect repair, scrapping and performing other corrective actions. I'll call the latter non-conformance. When we come back to quality and the execution and controlling stages of the project, we'll touch on quality assurance and control. That wraps up this review of Quality Planning which touched on the quality planning process, the quality management plan and a handful of tools and methods that can be used and considered for planning out quality within your project.