Practical & Strategic Collaboration

One of  my current side projects is studying the PMBOK, or the Project Management Book of Knowledge – yes, I am venturing into the world of Project Management.  I took a boot camp from Global Knowledge in 2011 but did not quickly follow that up with a test and therefore find myself remembering very little and all without the much-coveted PMP certification.

To fix this I have joined a virtual study group – we meet weekly and utilize a “train-the-trainer” approach to teach each other everything we can in attempt to ready ourselves to take, and hopefully pass, the PMP certification – yes, hopefully I will be able to add myself to the long list of those who have initials at the end of my name (John M Leask III, sadly, does not mean I am certified in some clever alliterative esoteric standard; it simply means I’m the third of my name – in case you were wondering).

Schedule mistakes aside, this week I set out to create my training aids so I could teach the study group about the Perform Quality Assurance process – part of the Project Quality Management Knowledge  Area within the Executing Process Group.  I could rebuild the entire presentation in a blog post here, but I think it is easier to simply supply direct access to it:

Slides 2 and 8 rely on heavy animations so you can skip them as the full content of those slides is displayed, without animations, in the following slides.

While working on this presentation I think the number one thing I struggled with was Quality Assurance versus Quality Control. After doing some research and really thinking about it I compared them in slide 4 – I assume I’m not the only one who has struggled with the differences.  Quality Assurance is a meta process – in other words it is a process to review the process to ensure quality standards can be met.  Quality Control, on the other hand, is something you perform on the product itself to make sure it meets said quality standards.  I found the following description by the admin user on PMZilla.com which helped to solidify my understanding – you can see this explained on slide 4:

Suppose you are manufacturing Coke. QA would ensure that you have all the right processes in place to manufacture and test the quality of the coke. Like the machines , people, recording mechanism etc. QC is doing the actual testing on finished product. So when the coke bottle is out you do a sample test and it would either pass or fail the Q standards.

So QC is to do with testing and verification after the deliverable is done and QA is before the deliverable is made. Like giving trainings to people, Auditing the process, ensuring everyone understands the process etc are all QA activities.

Please feel free to provide comments regarding the presentation – I will keep the most updated version on my SlideShare account.