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Customer satisfaction is about making sure that the people who are paying for the end product are happy with what they get. When the team gathers requirements for the specification, they try to write down all of the things that the customers want in the product so that you know how to make them happy. Some requirements can be left unstated, too. Those are the ones that are implied by the customer’s explicit needs. For example: some requirements are just common sense, like a product that people hold can’t be made from toxic chemicals that kill you. It might not be stated, but it’s definitely a requirement!
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Fitness to use is about making sure that the product you build has the best design possible to fit the customer’s needs. Which would you choose: a product that’s beautifully designed, well constructed, solidly built and all around pleasant to look at but does not do what you need, or a product that does what you want despite being really ugly and hard to use? You’ll always choose the product that fits your needs, even if it’s seriously limited. That’s why it’s important that the product both does what it is supposed to do and does it well. For example: you could pound in a nail with a screwdriver, but a hammer is better fit for the job.
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Conformance to requirements is the core of both customer satisfaction and fitness to use, and is a measure of how well your product does what you intend. Above all, your product needs to do what you wrote down in your requirements document. Your requirements should take into account what will satisfy your customer and the best design possible for the job. That means conforming to both stated and implied requirements.
In the end, your product’s quality is judged by whether you built what you said you would build.
Quality planning focuses on taking all of the information available to you at the beginning of your project and figuring out how you will measure your quality and prevent defects. Your company should have a quality policy that tells how it measures quality across the organization. You should make sure your project follows the company policy and any governmental rules or regulations on how you need to plan quality for your project.
You need to plan out which activities you’re going to use to measure the quality of the product of your project. And you need to be sure the activities you plan are going to pay off in the end. So you’ll need to think about the cost of all the quality-related activities you want to do. Then you’ll need to set some guidelines for what you going to measure against. Finally, you’ll need to design the tests you’re going to run when the product is ready to be tested.
The following represents the quality planning tools available to the project manager.
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Cost benefit analysis is looking at how much your quality activities will cost versus how much you will gain from doing them. The costs are easy to measure; the effort and resources it takes to do them are just like any other task on your schedule. Since quality activities don’t actually produce a product, it is harder for people to measure the benefit sometimes. The main benefits are less re-work, higher productivity and efficiency and more satisfaction from both the team and the customer.
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Benchmarking means using the results of quality planning on other projects to set goals for your own. You might find that the last project in your company had 20% fewer defects than the one before it. You should want to learn from a project like that and put in practice any of the ideas they used to make such a great improvement. Benchmarks can give you some reference points for judging your own project before you even get started with the work.
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Design of experiments is the list of all the kinds of tests you are going to run on your product. It might list all the kinds of test procedures you’ll do, the approaches you’ll take, and even the tests themselves. (In the software world, this is called test planning).
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Cost of quality is what you get when you add up the cost of all the prevention and inspection activities you are going to do on your project. It doesn’t just include the testing. It includes any time spent writing standards, reviewing documents, meeting to analyze the root causes of defects, re-work to fix the defects once they’re found by the team; absolutely everything you do to ensure quality on the project.
