Quality Management:

Understanding, evaluating, defining, and managing expectations are

essential to satisfying:
A. Customer requirements.
B. The scope statement.
C. Upper management.
D. Functional requirements.

One of the fundamental tenets of modern quality management states that:

A. Quality is planned and inspected in.
B. Quality does not cost.
C. Quality is planned, designed, and built in—not inspected in.
D. Quality requires constant inspection.

All of the following are primary benefits of meeting quality requirements EXCEPT:
A. Less rework.
B. Higher productivity.
C. Lower costs.
D. Fewer change orders.

Inputs to quality control include all of the following EXCEPT:

A. Project management plan.

B. Quality checklists.

C. Work performance measurements.

D. PERT chart.

Design of experiments (DOE) is a statistical method used to:

A. Determine how various elements of a project interrelate.

B. Identify which factors may influence specific variables of a product or process under development
or in production.

C. Establish a standard by which to measure project performance.

D. Compare actual or planned project practices to those of other projects.

The quality management plan provides input to and includes quality control, quality assurance, and
continuous process improvement approaches for the project.

A. The overall project management plan.

B. The WBS.

C. The project scope.

D. External project stakeholders.

Perform Quality Assurance is the process of:

A. Applying planned, systematic quality activities to ensure effective policing and conformance of the
project team to approved specifications.
B. Providing the project team and stakeholders with standards by which project performance is
measured.
C. Auditing the quality requirements and the results from quality control measurements to ensure
appropriate quality standards and operational definitions are used.
D. Assuring the implementation of appropriate specifications, which generally results in reducing the
probability of the project being completed on schedule.

A______is a specific type of histogram, ordered by frequency of occurrence, which shows how many
defects were generated by type or category of identified cause.

A. PERT chart.

B. Bar chart.

C. Network diagram.

D. Pareto chart.

Cost of quality includes all of the following EXCEPT:

A. Preventing nonconformance to requirements.

B. Appraising the product or service for conformance to requirements.

C. Failing to meet requirements.

D. Operating computers required for the project.

Due to the temporary nature of a project, the may choose to invest in product quality improvement,
especially defect prevention and appraisal:

A. Sponsoring organization.

B. Project management team.

C. Executive management team.

D. Project quality function deployment (QFD) organization.

Tools and techniques of the Perform Quality Control process include all of the following EXCEPT:

A. Flowcharting.

B. Pareto chart.

C. Control charts.

D. Quality control tendency charts.

Project Quality Management includes the processes and activities of the performing organization that
determine quality policies, objectives, and responsibilities so that:

A. The project will satisfy the needs for which it was undertaken.

B. Process capability will be improved.

C. Product and service results will be controlled.

D. Project team performance will meet standards.

Quality and grade are not the same. A fundamental distinction is that:

A. Grade is a category assigned to products or services having the same functional use but different
technical characteristics.

B. A quality level that fails to meet quality requirements may not be a problem; low grade is always a
problem.

C. Delivering the required levels of quality is not included in the responsibilities of the project manager
and the project team.

D. Delivering the required levels of grade is not included in the responsibilities of the project manager
and the project team.
Control charts have all of the following characteristics EXCEPT:

A. They are used to determine whether or not a process is stable or has predictable performance.

B. They are used to monitor various types of output variables.

C. They are used to illustrate how various factors might be linked to potential problems or effects.

D. They are used to illustrate how a process behaves over time and when a process is subject to special
cause variation, resulting in an out-of-control condition.

Perform Quality is the process of auditing the quality requirements and the results from quality
control measurements to ensure appropriate quality standards and operational definitions are used.

A. Planning.

B. Assurance.

C. Improvement.

D. Benchmarking.

In using cost-benefit analysis in the Plan Quality process it can be noted that:

A. The primary benefit of meeting quality requirements is the reduced cost associated with project
quality management activities.

B. The primary benefits of meeting quality requirements can include less rework, higher productivity,
lower costs, and increased stakeholder satisfaction.

C. The primary cost of meeting quality requirements is increased rework.

D. Quality cost cannot be evaluated in relationship to the expected benefit of quality.

All of the following are characteristics of benchmarking EXCEPT:

A. It involves comparing actual or planned project practices to those of comparable projects to generate
ideas for improvement. 

B. It involves comparing actual or planned project practices to those of comparable projects to provide a
basis for measuring performance.

C. It involves comparing actual or planned project practices to those of comparable projects within the
performing organization or outside of it.

D. It involves comparing actual or planned project practices to those of comparable projects only
within the same application area.
All of the following are true about Six Sigma EXCEPT:

A. It is a quality improvement initiative undertaken by the performing organization.

B. It should improve the quality of the project's management.

C. It should improve the quality of the project's product.

D. It focuses on systematically correcting defects, errors, or mistakes revealed by inspection.

CHAPTER 10:PROJECT QUALITY MANAGEMENT
Questions:

1.Question: In your semiconductor company, there have been several instances in the past one week
where few circuits have not been accurate. You have been assigned the task of trying to determine the
potential cause for the variations. You can do this using a (an):
1. Control Chart
2. Ishikawa Diagram
3. Pareto Diagram
4. Inspection
2.Question: You are managing tooling for an aircraft part. Your team tells you that they got few defective
parts. When you asked them the reasons for the defect, they mentioned that it could be because of
several reasons including material used, the measurement system, tolerances in the machine not being
accurate or other factors. To help them better illustrate how various factors might have contributed to the
defect, you will:
1. Use a control chart
2. Draw a fishbone diagram
3. Create a flowchart
4. Draw a Pareto Chart

3.Question: Quality management complements project management. It emphasises :

1. Meeting or exceeding customer expectations using additional features
2. Conformance to requirements and fitness for use
3. Decreasing total cost of ownership of the project
4. All of the above

4.Question: Your company has developed a software product - while doing beta testing for your product
with a small sample of users, it was noted that the product showed defects because of following reasons:
- Non-compatibility with operating system (20%)
- Bugs in the software (22%)
- Difficulty in understanding instruction manuals (20%)
- Non-availability of desired features (15%)
- Others (23%)

To highlight the cause of problems, you could use a:

1. Flowchart
2. Quality Checklist
3. Pareto Chart
4. Histogram

5.Question: The project team has added some additional functionality which was not required as part of
the project. However the customer is satisfied with the project. From a quality perspective,
1. This is high quality because it exceeded customer expectations
2. This is not acceptable quality because gold plating was done which is not advisable
3. This will mean repeat business from the same customer.
4. None of the above

6.Question: All the following are costs incurred to ensure compliance to requirements except:
1. Prevention Costs
2. Appraisal Costs
3. Quality Planning Costs
4. Warranty Costs

7.Question: Since your quality process was not up to the four sigma requirements desired by your
customer, some of your products were rejected, and there is a potential that you would not get repeat
business from the same customer. From a quality perspective, the costs associated with your products
being rejected can also be categorized as:
1. Cost of conformance
2. Customer retention costs
3. Failure costs
4. Performance cost

8.Question: According to the 80/20 rule, 80 percent of the problems are because of 20 percent of the
causes. To facilitate finding out which are the most probable defects, and to evaluate nonconformities,
you do a rank ordering of the defects using:
1. Statistical Sampling
2. Control Chart
3. Pareto Diagrams
4. Inspection

9.Question: Quality planning involves identifying which quality standards are relevant to the project and
determining how to satisfy them. It is one of the key processees when doing the Planning process group
and should be performed in parallel with other project planning processes.

For example, the required changes in the product to meet identified quality standards may require cost or
schedule adjustments, or the desired product quality may require a detailed risk analysis of an identified
problem.

In this context, all the following statements about Quality planning are accurate EXCEPT:
1. Quality planning is performed in parallel with other project planning processes.
2. While doing quality planning, you should be aware about governmental agency regulations, rules,
standards and guidelines specific to the application area.
3. You can use DOE to help identify which factors may influence specific variable of a product or process
under development.
4. After Quality planning, you can recommend actions to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the
performing organization
10.Question: When all customer requirements for the product of the project are satisfied,
1. Customer expectations are exceeded
2. Costs may be very high
3. Quality criteria are met
4. The product will be successful in the market.
11.Question: For doing Quality Planning, you are going to use Design of Experiments to determine which
factors might influence specific variables. What variable can be used in your analysis?
1. Dollars
2. Pounds
3. Weight
4. Meters
12.Question: You are the project manager responsible for understanding the customer habits for a soap
being produced by your company. It is always advisable to do Statistical Sampling for this project,
because testing the entire population, would have all the following problems except:
1. Provide Inaccurate Data
2. Be very Expensive
3. Take longer time
4. May require more resources to do the survey

13.Question: Quality control involves monitoring specific project results to determine if they comply with
relevant quality standards. To evaluate Quality Control outputs, the project team should definitely have a
working knowledge of:
1. Prevention and Inspection
2. Sampling and Probability
3. Special Causes and Random Causes
4. Tolerances and Control Limits

14.Question: All the following statements about Special Cause and common cause variations are
accurate EXCEPT:
1. Special causes are also called random causes
2. Special causes refer to unusual events
3. Common cause variations are usually smaller in magnitude when compared with Special cause
variations
4. Common Causes refer to Normal process variation

15.Question: You are the project manager for an automobile company. Because of change in
Government regulations, the emission norms for automobile vehicles have been made stricter. As a
project manager, you are concerned that your project will not satisfy the required quality standards. This
could be remedied through better:
1. Quality Assurance
2. Quality Planning
3. Quality Control
4. Modifications to Quality Management Plan
16.Question: Determining and delivering the required levels of quality is the responsibility of:
1. Project Sponsor
2. Project Manager / Project Management Team
3. Project Team
4. All Stakeholders in the project

17.Question: Which of the following statements about Quality Control is not accurate?
1. Prevention refers to keeping errors out of the process, whereas inspection refers to keeping errors out
of hand of the customer.
2. Variables sampling determines whether the result conforms or not, and attribute sampling determines
the degree of conformity.
3. Common causes are normal process variations, but special causes refer to unusual events.
4. Tolerance determines if the result falls within acceptable range, but control limits are used to determine
if the process is in control.

18.Question: In your project, you want to identify which quality standards are relevant to your project, and
determine how to satisfy them. For this, you will do:
1. Quality Assurance
2. Quality Planning
3. Quality Control
4. Quality Management

19.Question: After Quality Planning, you created an item-specific tool to verify that a set of steps definitely
get followed while testing your product. This can also be referred to as a:
1. Checklist
2. Operational Definition
3. Quality Management Plan
4. Design of Experiment

20.Question: In your project, you have collected information from the project management plan about the
planned or expected results along with the information about the actual results and implemented change
requests. This will be a valuable input for Quality control process and should be included as part of:
1. Work Performance information
2. Organizational Process Assets
3. Quality Management Plan
4. Quality Metrics

21.Question: After Project Control, Organizational Process Assets are updated. Wherever checklists are
used, the completed checlists should become part of the
1. Project`s records
2. Project files
3. Project Quality Management plan
4. Lessons Learned documentation

22.Question: All the following are tools and techniques for Quality Planning except:
1. Cost-benefit analysis
2. Quality checklists
3. Cost of Quality
4. Additional quality planning tools
23.Question: As a project manager, you are aware that quality has costs associated with it. Cost of quality
is (select best answer)
1. Cost in appraising product or service
2. Cost of rework
3. Costs incurred by investment in preventing noncorformance to requirements
4. All of the above

24.Question: When your completed product was provided to the customer for approval, he was not
satisfied with the product`s quality. From a quality perspective, the cost of poor quality can also be
referred to as:
1. Cost of non-conformance
2. Failure cost
3. Rework cost
4. None of the above

25.Question: Quality control involves monitoring project results to determine if they comply with relevant
quality standards. Which of the following is an output from Quality control?
1. Quality Control Measurements
2. Quality Management Plan
3. Quality Baseline
4. Quality Planning tools and techniques

ANSWERS:

1. Ans: 1
Justification: A control chart`s purpose is to determine whether or not a process is stable or has
predictable performance. Control charts may serve as a data gathering tool to show when a process is
subject to special cause variation, which creates an out-of-control condition.

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 192

2. Ans: 2
Justification: Cause and effect diagrams, also referred to as Ishikawa or fishbone diagrams illustrate how
various factors might be linked to potential problems or effects. (Please Refer to Figure 8-6)

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 192

3. Ans: 2
Justification: Modern Quality Management complements Project Management.... This requires a
combination of conformance to requirements(the project must produce what it said it would produce) and
fitness for use (the product or service produced must satisfy real needs)
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 181

comments: Option 1 talks about "exceeding customer expectations by providing additional features" - this
is gold plating and not recommended by PMI

4. Ans: 4
Justification: A histogram is a bar chart showing a distribution of variables. Each column represents an
attribute or characteristic of a problem/situation. The height of each column represents a relative
frequency of the characteristic. This tool helps identify the cause of problems in a process by the shape
and width of the distribution.

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 194

5. Ans: 2
Justification: Customer Satisfaction requires a combination of conformance to requirements (i.e. the
project would produce what it said it would produce)

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 191

comments: PMI believes that providing more functionality (gold plating) is not a good practice - even if it
satisfies the customer

6. Ans:4
Justification: Prevention and appraisal costs (cost of conformance) include costs for quality planning,
quality control and quality assurance to ensure compliance to requirements

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 356

7. Ans: 3
Justification: Failure costs(cost of non-conformance) include costs to rework products, components, or
processes that are non-compliant, costs of warranty, waste and rework and loss of reputation.

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 356

8. Ans:3
Justification: A Pareto chart is a specific type of histogram, ordered by frequency of occurrence, which
shows how many defects were generated by type or category of identified cause (Figure 8-9). The Pareto
technique is used primarily to identify and evaluate non-conformities.

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 195

9. Ans: 4
Justification:
- Option 1 : This is mentioned in the question and is correct
- Option 2 : These refer to Enterprise Environmental factors which are inputs to the Quality Planning
process
- Option 3 : Design of Experiments is a tool for Quality Planning
- Option 4 : This refers to "Recommended Corrective Action" which is an output from the Quality
Assurance process and not Quality Planning process
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 190

10. Ans: 3
Justification: Option 3: Quality Management includes customer satisfaction (i.e. understanding,
evaluating, defining and managing expectations so that customer expectations are met).

If customer requirements are satisfied,

* It is not necessary that customer expectations are exceeded

* It does not necessarily mean high costs
* Product may still fail in the market (because other than quality, there are factors like market
expectations, marketing, competitor products etc. which may determine whether the product succeeds or
fails

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 181

11. Ans: 3
Justification: Weight in the only variable here. All the others are measures.

12. Ans: 1
Justification: Testing the full population will not provide inaccurate data - the data would be very accurate
if the whole population is tested

13. Ans: 2
Justification: The project management team must have a working knowledge of statistical quality control,
especially sampling and probability, to help it evaluate quality control outputs.
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 190

14. Ans: 1
Justification: Special causes(unusual events) and common causes (normal process variation). Common
causes are also called random causes.

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 191

15. Ans: 1
Justification: Quality Assurance (QA) is the application of planned, systematic quality activities to ensure
that the project will employ all processes needed to meet requirements.

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 187

16. Ans: 2
Justification: The project manager and the project management team are responsible for determining and
delivering the required levels of both quality and grade.
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 180
17. Ans: 2
Justification: Attribute sampling (the result conforms, or it does not) and variables sampling (the result is
rated on a continuous scale that measures the degree of conformity)
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 191

18. Ans: 2
Justification: Quality Planning involves identifying which quality standards are relevant to the project and
determining how to satisfy them.
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 183

19. Ans: 1
Justification: A checklist is a structured tool, usually component-specific, used to verify that a set of
required steps has been performed.

Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 187

20. Ans: 1
Justification: Work performance information including technical performance measures, project
deliverables completion status, and the implementation of required corrective actions are important inputs
to QC. Information from the project management plan about the planned or expected results should be
available along with information about the actual results and implemented change requests.
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 191

21. Ans: 1
Justification: When checklists are used (as output of Quality Control Process), the completed checklists
should become part of the project`s records.
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 197

22. Ans: 2
Justification: Refer Figure 8-3
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 184

23. Ans: 4
Justification: Quality costs are the total costs incurred by investment in preventing nonconformance to
requirements, appraising the product or service for conformance to requirements, and failing to meet
requirements (rework)
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 186

24. Ans: 2
Justification: Failure costs are also called cost of poor quality
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 186

25. Ans: 1
Justification: Figure 8-5
Reference: PMBOK Third Edition, Page Number: 191