The Comparing Aspects Of Project Management Approaches

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

CMT3342

CW2: Comparing Aspects of Project Management Approaches

Name: Lee Ying Kit Thomas

Student No: M00459130

Introduction

Quality control in Project Management is an essential part of the triple constraints; quality is a factor of all the triple constraints: scope, time, and cost. There got traditional and Agile approaches, and both of them got advantages and disadvantages. Normally quality control is checking errors during project implementation. Each project also got the quality control procedure. Quality control inspectors are used for checking quality. Statistical quality control techniques are also applied for monitoring quality. Conformity which agreed the specifications requirements are monitored. Adjustments or changes are made for deviations. The output need to be in some standards, it will be rejected if not in the list, another way round will be scrapped or reworked on the same stage.

Project management exceed the client needs in areas, but is there any way to know if there is quality control for that? It is so difficult to know all the needs, and even then, teams seldom know how to measure the quality of the project delivery until it is too late. So in general, Quality control helps to know more about the standard from the project. And make the output be success and fulfil the requirements or standards.

Quality control and management in traditional project management approaches

Traditional PM, the concepts of the various elements, Quality System, Quality Assurance, Quality Planning, Quality Control.(Quality Management in Prince 2)

Quality Management is the process of ensuring that the quality expected by the Customer is achieved. It encompasses all the project management activities which determine and implement the Project’s Quality Plan. The various elements of an organisation’s quality management interrelate and are as follows:

Quality System with an organisation structure, procedures and processes to implement quality management. Both the Customer and the Supplier may have quality systems. The project may have to use one of these systems or an agreed mixture of both. PRINCE itself will typically form part of a corporate or Programme quality system where it has been adopted as a corporate standard.

Quality Assurance which sets up the quality system and is the means of assuring that the quality system operates to achieve an end product which meets quality and customer requirements. It creates and maintains the quality system, audits and evaluates it. A quality assurance function may be set up separate from and independent of the organisation’s project and operational activities to monitor use of the quality system across all projects within the corporate body. If such an independent body does not exist, the project assurance function within the project will assume the quality assurance role.

Quality Planning which establishes the objectives and requirements for quality and lays out the activities for the application of the quality system. In the Project Initiation Document the quality approach for the whole project is defined in the Project Quality Plan. Customer’s quality expectations are understood and documented prior from the project commencement. This is the basic setting for Starting up any Project. Each Stage Plan must be in detail from the required quality activities and resources, with the detailed quality criteria shown in the Product Descriptions.

Quality Control, which is the means of ensuring that products meet the quality criteria specified for them. Quality control is about examining Products to determine that they meet requirements.

OGC (June 2009) mentioned that there got more sections than the project file, on the control parts, it need to copy many authorises, like creating different reports (checkpoint reports, highlight reports, exception reports). Change control can ensure the quality, it including the submission, analysis and decision-making. It always can be review the report which can learn from report, it will be including statistic from the quality control, it is approved by the project board.

OGC (June 2009) said that the quality control must be examined with all reports at the end of each stage. That information is a value, which is the success of quality review.

OGC (June 2009) described that we have to clear define ways on the customer’s expectation is importance, and if the define ways sufficient to achieve. And all responsibility for log been allocated is the key for the reporting.

Quality control and management in agile project management approaches

Agile project management allow project managers to deliver priority, quality work to their stakeholders. It’s costly and error-prone approach to project management.

Project requirement always changing, it usually happened after each meeting or review form the customers. When customers are expected to finalize the requirements so they can test the prototypes, overhead and long delays often happened in the project. Agile Project Management is about embracing change, even late in the development stage. It’s about delivering the features with the greatest business value first, it allow to change many time in the prototypes after got the requirement changed from the customers and having the real-time information to manage cost, time and scope.

Agile Project Management schedule breaking down the many months, it will take long cycle of building requirements for the project, it can be building up the entire product and then testing to find hundreds of product flaws. Instead, small usable segments of the software product are specified, developed and tested in manageable, two to four week cycles.

In Agile Project Management divides these project management responsibilities among into three Agile roles: the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and team members. The product owner will design the product features, requirement and the schedule. The Scrum Master guides the team to complete the tasks. The Team Members will do the most parts of the task assignment, and it usually up to 5-7 members.

Kenneth S. Rubin (July 2012) think that by working at the accelerate velocity, it may needed to finish all the feature by the desired date, a prevalent myth is that testing is overhead by reducting the test, so it can accelerate velocity but for the team, they still need to keep the quality for the project.

Kenneth S. Rubin (July 2012) mentions that we need to verify the quality until we do the testing. And for the quality control, it allow being some things that is cross-functional scrum team, it continuously do every sprint. It will me high value centric.

Kenneth S. Rubin (July 2012) describe that the plan – driven need to fast but never hurry, it mean we will follow the plan and follow to do the right thing at right time, if working in hurry, the quality of the outcome maybe not good or in the standard.

Comparison of quality control and management in traditional and agile project management approaches

From the Traditional and Agile project management , we both can see it got plan, do , check, act; but between 2 management approaches, this is a little different; in the Plan level , the traditional is to define the objective, understand the requirement, and plan for implementation and delivery. Not the same on Agile is, it will generate a list of product features called the product backlog. Create a plan for implementing the backlog items in order of priority. It will be breaking up into incremental scrums, and be implemented in every Scrum.

From the do stage, Traditional will execute the plan in incremental steps. Each step may last for some time, like few weeks or months. And it may not be fully functional after each step is completed. In Agile, it will be implement the items that are part of the Scrum. It will takes short time for each stage, and at the end of the scrum, the product features are fully functional.

In the check stage that is straight forward for both approaches review the results of the plan execution. Test, analyze the results and identify what worked and what did not in the project, it is importance that make sure all steps are in stage.

In the ACT stage, Tradition approaches will be based on lesson learnt in review; it will go through the cycle again with the new ideas or update to change the requirements on itself. Agile will go through the cycle again with a modified plan. In case if the product backlog is being modified, then it will allow to go back to setup 1 and repeat the step, in other words, if the product backlog needs to be modified and the items re-prioritized, please go back to step 1 and do so. Repeat the steps.

Summary of the comparison

In General, Traditional allow manage and control, and the Agile will accept the change. And it is comprehensive up front the test design and agile plan as it goes.

And for the documentation, traditional approaches always only have verbose documentation for the design, and Agile only absolutely necessary on the documentation.

For the Traditional approaches, each team member has a fixed role, such as if you are the programmer, you will only do the programming things, but in Agile, all level built by anyone, that is an integral part of the project.

In Traditional approach, that is more on project base process-oriented, in some sense, it means the project manager has less power, it more like a coordination role. In Scrum, the Scrum master got more power in comparing between 2 approaches.

Conclusions

The advantages of Tradition are the division of the project into fixed compartments, each team do their own job, it not totally related, but work individuals. The result of each individuals is like the transition points of stages and it always doesn’t affect project execution but maybe only affect the delivery schedule.

But the disadvantages are the inflexibility and rigidity, it not allows you to come back, and that is not possible to alter and completed stage.

The Advantages of Agile is flexibilable, the basic design is simple, and it can be change during the working progresses. It request users changed request and can be easy to change the plan, once got the CAB approval. It allows different developer and works on different modules, and set it up all together at the end.

The Disadvantages of Agile is as the expectation outcome result maybe it the same from the beginning, the schedule time planning may always changes due to their got lot of changes during the progresses.

Agile ‘s overhead is less and the project cost is consider less than using the tradition method. For the business is always talked about business environment is uncertain, Agiles allow making changes frequently no matter in any stage. In traditional project management, planning and control methods are very specific and controlled.

Robert K. Wysocki,Ph.D. (2007 ) mentions that quality never happen without any planning, for the tradition approach, it will always follow the plan from the project. But Kenneth S. Rubin (July 2012) point of view on Agile is, the quality can be upgraded, after any changes, and the quality will be improved.

Robert K. Wysocki,Ph.D. (2007 ) thinks all the control and quality are positively correlated with each other. But we will never know how that will be after the changed for the system until the whole project completed; but in Scrum, Kenneth S. Rubin (July 2012) point out that if deliver good- quality results faster and with less technical debt, and it is the test-driven development and small piece will make the test pass easily.