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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management
Running Head: UNIT 4: PROJECT QUALITY AND HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Unit 4: Project Quality and Human Resource Management
Dale Henderson
Kaplan University
Professor Chad McAllister
IT511: Information Systems Project Management
July 6, 2013
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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management
Unit 4: Project Quality and Human Resource Management
1. Explain project quality management by separating its primary components.
Project quality management is make sure that the project will meet the needs for
which is being undertaken. The project team must develop good relationships with the
key stakeholders, especially the main customer for the project, to understand what quality
means to them. Many projects fail because the project team focus only on meeting the
written requirements for the main products being produced and ignores other stakeholder
needs and expectations for the project (Schwalbe, 2011).
There are three components with dealing with project quality management and they
are: Planning quality, Performing quality assurance, and performing quality control and
to have a good understanding of project quality management you must also understand
what these components entail.

Planning quality involves knowing which quality standards are relevant to the
project and how to satisfy those standards. Having quality standards into a project
design is a key part for quality planning. An example would be a standard for
quality to information technology services. There are metrics which is a standard
of measurements and organizations will use this measurement.
Planning quality also includes important aspects of information technology
projects that affect quality include functionality and features, systems outputs,
performance, and reliability and maintainability. Functionality is the degree to
which a system performs the function. Features are the systems special
characteristics that appeal to users. System Outputs are the screens and reports the
system generates. Performance addressees how well a product or service performs
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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management
the customer’s intended to use it. Reliability is the ability of the product or service
to perform as expected under normal conditions. Maintainability addresses the
ease of performing maintenance on a product (Schwalbe, 2011).

Performing quality assurance is a periodically evaluating overall project
performance to ensure that the project will meet and satisfy the relevant quality
standards. It involves taking responsibility for quality through the life cycle of the
project. Top managers must be leaders in emphasizing the roles all employees
play in quality assurance, especially senior manager roles. Benchmarking
generates ideas for quality improvements by comparing specific project practices
or project characteristics to those of other project or products within or outside the
performing organization. Also quality audit is a structured review of specific
quality management activities that help identify lessons learned that could
improve performance on current or future projects (Schwalbe, 2011).

Performing quality control is the monitoring specific project results to ensure that
they comply with relevant quality standards while identifying ways to improve
overall quality. This component is often associated with the technical tools and
techniques of quality management, such Pareto charts, quality control charts, and
statistical sampling. With quality control you have three areas that is involved and
they are (1) Acceptance decisions that determines if the products or services
produced as part of the project will be accepted or rejected. (2) Rework is action
taken to bring rejected items into compliance with product requirements or
specifications or other stakeholder expectations. Usually used on defected
products this is where request changes are done and this can be very expensive.
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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management
(3) Process adjustments correct or prevent further quality problems based on
quality control measurements. These are found using quality control
measurements and they often result in updates to quality baselines, organization
process assets, and project management plan (Schwalbe, 2011).
2. Illustrate the three main outcomes of quality control using examples from real or
fictionally projects that follow a software development lifecycle.
Zazzy Computer’s builds higher end computers and laptops for organizations that deal
with AutoCAD, graphics and multimedia. In the past few months there have been
customer complaints that the computers have been having issues with the graphic cards
that are be used in these systems. The systems that are having the issues are the desktops
and are being returned for repairs. So the first step is to see why the graphic cards are not
working and decide if they should use a different one or spend time trying to figure out
what the problem is, after further review it was found out that the vendor sent them
faulting graphic cards. So all the cards were return for a refund to the vendor and a new
one was selected by a different vendor at this stage is where acceptance decision will be
accepted or rejected and in any product or service. If accepted they are considered to be
validated deliverables. If the project is found to be faulty or rejected it there will be
rework. If the graphic card is rejected or does not meet with compliance, requirements,
specifications or stakeholders expectations than it will go to rework. This will require
changes to the defected graphic card and will be very expensive. It is up to project
manager to have a good quality planning and quality assurance. Measuring quality
control will through process adjustments will correct or prevent further quality problems
based on them measurements. Zazzy Computers will do testing to make sure every single
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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management
do graphic card passes a stress test and that it is benched mark at where it should be.
Every employee who is working on the graphic card phased will be trained and that each
machine passes the tests that are done and will reject any graphic card that do not past the
specifications and requirements of the tests performed. No system will be shipped until
all tests are met and inspected by the final inspector (Schwalbe, 2011).
3. What are the five major cost categories related to quality? Briefly describe each
category.
Cost Categories
Prevention Cost
Appraisal Cost
Internal Failure Cost
External Failure Cost
Measurement and Test Equipment Costs
Description
The cost of planning and executing a project
so that it is error free or within an acceptable
error range
Evaluating processes and their outputs to
ensure that a project is error free or within an
acceptable error range.
A cost incurred to correct an identified defect
before the customer receives the project.
A cost that relates to all errors not detected and
not corrected before delivery to the customer.
The capital cost of equipment used to perform
prevention and appraisal activities.
4. Explain human resource management in terms of phases of activities.
Human resource management includes the processes required to make the most
effective use of people involved with a project. It includes all the project stakeholders,
sponsors, customers, project team members, support staff, suppliers supporting the
project to just name a few, there are four areas that is included with human resource
management and they are:
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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management

Developing the human resource plan involves identifying and documenting
project roles, responsibility, and reporting relationships. The main output is the
human resource plan.

Acquiring the project team involves getting the need personal assigned to and
working on the project. The outputs for this are project staff assignments, resource
calendars, and project management plan updates.

Developing the project team is building individual and group skills to enhance
project managers. Team building skills are often a challenge for many project
managers. The main outputs are team performance assessments and enterprise
environmental factor updates.

Managing the project team is tracking team member’s performance, motivating
team members, providing timely feedback, resolving issues and conflicts, and
coordinating changes to help enhance project performance. The outputs are
enterprise environmental factor updates, organizational process assets updates,
change requests, and project management plan updates (Schwalbe, 2011).
5. As a project manager, how could you apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to an
information technology project?
There are five behaviors or levels of the Maslow’s hierarchy and they are: (1)
Physiological (2) Safety (3) Social (4) Esteem and (5) Self-Actualization. It starts with
the Physiological at the bottom of the pyramid once that is satisfied than it goes to the
next level which is Safety and once that is done it goes up the pyramid until the whole
cycle has been completed. With an Information project usually the physiological and
safety behavior is not a concern especially in a new project. I would say safety behavior
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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management
might come into play if the person is being over worked and safety will have to be taken
into account for the members/members of the team, being over worked will affect how
these members will perform on the project. The next step would be “Social” which would
give the team member acceptance, love, affection and association with the team or group,
after that would be to go to the “Esteem” which gives recognition, prestige and status to
that team member. The next and last step is “Self-Actualization” this gives the team
member challenging projects and opportunities for innovation and creativity within the
project. Having this implemented within the project will help the project manager know
his or her team. This is a great system to use by project managers and should not be over
looked (Schwalbe, 2011).
6. Analyze the issues that could be encountered during each of the five stages of the
Tuckman team formation model.

The forming stage is the stage where little work is done and is the introduction of
team members. Initiation of the team or new members is introduced. The
members introduced in this stage could lack experience and would take time to
train them and get them to where they need to be for the project.

The storming stage occurs as team has different opinions as how the team should
operate. The problems in this stage are people will have different opinions and
will test each other and this can and will cause conflicts within this stage.

The norming stage is where the team has develop a working method that is agreed
on and the problem with this phase which corrects all the conflicts in the storming
phase is that it could take time to correct them conflicts.
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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management

The performing stage is when the emphasis is on reaching the team goals, rather
than working on the process. Conflicts have been reached and agreed on and more
complicated task is done at this stage. Problems can be if there are less people for
these tasks it can take time to finish them. Not a stage where less experienced
team members should be working by them. More experience people are required
for this stage.

The adjourning stage involves the breakup of team after they successfully reached
their goals and complete the work. Problems are sometimes this happens before
all the work has been done and the project manager needs to make sure it has been
completed before the break-up of the team. Always double check before
completing this stage (Schwalbe, 2011).
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Unit 4:Project Quality and Human Resoure Management
References
Schwalbe, K. (2011). Information Technology Project Management (6 ed.). Boston: Cengage
Learning.
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