Project Quality Management Assignment: A Critical Reflection
Question
Task: Project Quality Management Reflection topic background: According to PMBOK (2017) Quality Project Management includes the processes for incorporating the organisation’s quality policy regarding planning, managing and controlling project and product quality requirements in order to meet stakeholder’s objectives. (PMBOK, 2017, p.271-305). Quality Management is structured under three processes: planning, execution, monitoring/controlling. Planning requires the process of identifying and planning quality requirements and or standards for the project and its deliverables by developing and executing a quality management plan.
In this critical reflection essay you are expected to focus on Assignment Section 2, the development of quality waste management product. In Section 2 of the assignment, you established a set of key deliverables from some key chosen knowledge areas to effectively and successfully prepare for your waste management project. However it is important to understand how the knowledge areas and their tools and processes were integrated to ensure the achievement of a quality product.
The following question should guide the analytical discussion of your reflective thinking. Your essay discussion should be between 2,000 to 2,250 words (including in text citations).
Critical Reflection Question:
“Critically reflect and evaluate how the integrated nature of the various knowledge areas would contribute to the quality of your waste management product. In essence critically reflect upon your experiences with developing and integrating key knowledge areas and how they can be used to deliver your quality product!”
Answer
Introduction
The whole research on the study examined in the project quality management assignment is mainly conducted on organic waste, its disposal and quality management to make households understand that along with plastics being harmful to nature, organic waste also poses a drastic impact on the nation. With organic waste disposal, Carbon dioxide emission has increased making the soil less adaptable. It also leads to methane production which is a dangerous factor to the Victorian environment. Now a research analysis has been conducted on project quality management to ensure proper stakeholder analysis, cost, scope, budget, communication and risk is management through identification and study. The main purpose of the research on project quality management assignment is to make household identify and classify the organic garbage waste. The given essay works on reflection to verify the key contribution of addressed areas and how they are integrated. It thus identifies the key learning and future application to maintain proper execution of tools and methods used.
Discussion
In order to understand the Interdependencies of knowledge areas, a proper study is been done by me. It is easy to ignore organic waste as waste pollution in the environment. The research contributes to solving the issue of food or organic waste disposal which indirectly can become a serious issue to nature. The project outlined in the project quality management assignment focuses on key areas like stakeholder analysis, schedule management, scope management, cost and budget management along with risk assessment to analyse a proper initiative, planning, support and execution of the research. I believe that the key areas present are quite interdependent as each of them plays an equal contribution to support the project execution. For this research, I conducted stakeholder management and stakeholder analysis to understand the relationship in this effective project (Mok et al., 2015). It made me understand the stakeholders that would contribute to this project, the unique communication of their needs and requirements for this project. Stakeholder analysis has also been conducted for stakeholder identification and understanding their need after analysing it. It helps to identify all primary and secondary requirements along with stakeholders that have vested their interest to understand the project issue and develop a strategic view about relationships between others and the issues. According to me, a proper stakeholder analysis requires a proper communication plan. To understand the interest and to satisfy the requirements, proper communication is essential between the external manager of the project and top management to ensure characteristics are accurate, needed and organized. After conducting stakeholder management, I think that the influence of them can affect my project success and failure.
As per the readings outlined in the discussion on project quality management assignment I need to maintain a tight interaction with them to accelerate my project completion work with high quality. For this, I required regular and effective communication plan (Sunder, 2016). For instance, I contacted Josh Fergus the councillor of Monash city to sponsor my project. I even took help from Waste Ninja as well as eco organics to be my project advisors and established contact with Flintec Company to provide dustbins and sensors to calculate the amount of waste generated. For maintaining good relationships, I encouraged communication dependency with help of Hannah, Siddhartha and Eva to understand project status, review it and discuss the work daily with the team for what to do next and how to evaluate. Similarly along with stakeholder management is the scope management for the project. Both are also interdependent. With stakeholder being the priority, scope management will enable their requirements and WBS to understand what actual needs are and how those needs would be met. I feel that in my project every stakeholder did not have a similar approach, so I put the highest priority first (Too et al., 2017). With scope management, I made sure the work requirement, getting proper information is achieved so that my project work is started. With scope management, I made sure that organic waste project is successfully managed including cost, time and quality and also focused on project initiation, proper planning, scope definition and verification with change control. I also implemented a WBS structure that analysed my main focus of food waste recycling system with proper management, scope and schedule planning for risk areas. This was the step where I related my stakeholder analysis through contacts, meet the necessity and identifying the external needs for my project to meet.
After scope management, and proper stakeholder contact as discussed in the context of this project quality management assignment, I inter relate my work with schedule management. Here I managed time to execute my project activities and reduce time consumption and optimize the resources with full utilization. I maintained a Gantt chart, with critical path and its analysis. My time management, scope and stakeholder were all related and dependent on budget formation and source of cost resources (Banker et al., 2017). With that, I can properly execute my waste project quality management wit cost plan and complete it. Risk management is a function key area was interrelated with project risks where I chose to adopt a "hazard and risk register" to properly execute my plan.
A proper critical evaluation is performed within the report of project quality management assignment where I will understand key knowledge areas contribution to my work. In the very first step, I made use of stakeholder management and stakeholder analysis concept to understand who will be an effective part to contribute input in my decision making and help the outcome to be satisfactory of such ideas. For my project related to organic waste project quality management and making household understand the organic waste classification, I took the help of different stakeholders starting from investors to customers that started their ideas and took the initiative to promote towards project success (Radujkovi? & Sjekavica, 2017). Stakeholders were primary step for my project integration. I contacted City Monash; waste ninja Water Company and Flintec Company because these would have a high impact to manage the quality of my project regarding organic waste. I used these stakeholders to determine my project success or failure and to accelerate the project completion with better quality. I took the help of city Monash as the main sponsor of my initiative and Waste Ninja played an advisory part. As discussed in the segments of project quality management assignment, my project was to make household understand about organic waste, I contacted water company as they contributed to provide me dustbins to give to each household, Not only that Flintec company provided me with weight sensors so that I could sense the amount of waste generated daily from houses. I took the help of community developer that along with me promoted education to citizens about organic waste (Hopkin, 2018). With these stakeholders, I was able to analyse the individual interacts with customers to help my customers distinguish between stakeholder impact and formulation of the project strategy. With this step, I also established a communication plan so that people like Hannah, Siddhartha and Eva being project managers can help to circulate the idea among the team and follow up the work. As per the research carried on the project quality management assignment, the stakeholder help to achieve quality to understand what are the requirements of the project and as it is the primary step it will help me to address and meet financial and material needs as well. All I worked was to satisfy their needs and here in my project the main stakeholder contribution in "The City of Monash” that sponsored and funded my work with proper resources.
I also made a scope management plan with WBS structure because Scope along with cost and time are an important part to execute the work. Along with stakeholder requirements, WBS structure was used to effectively manage and contribute my work as well as other areas like budget, time and risk. It helped to integrate, initiate and verify my control over the project. Thus for integrating and contributing towards my initiative or managing organic waste, I made sure that requirements of stakeholders listed and proper WBS structure is made with levels to understand the whole concept (Sadgrove, 2016). WBS structure examined in the project quality management assignment helped me a lot in my project integration because it gave me an insight into various levels starting from project management, planning, scope and schedule. It also helps to address the plan for risk and change areas with proper requirement analysis. This helped me a lot to understand how to configure my work. Not only that WBS structure contributed to data requirements, barcode generation, assigning bins at houses, weight display through sensors and creating a plan for connecting and updating the data. Thus all this configuration, customization, internal testing, software installation and integration discussed in the context of this project quality management assignment contributed to my understanding of major project needs which will help in the proper execution of organic waste management.
After I understood the requirements and stakeholders needs, schedule management also contributed a lot to my project. Only my identification of requirements will not be enough to execute my work. Scheduling is as important because it contributed to time optimization and maintaining work deadlines. I enacted all tasks, activities, milestones and deliverables into Gantt chart with a start, finish and duration date that will contribute towards my understanding of project completion (Hu et al., 2016). With Schedule management, it contributed towards activity sequence to well understand it and even mentioned about slack time with the critical path. Use of network diagram by me contributed towards a pictorial presentation of my work with a sequence of activities and dates. So finally I integrated the activities altogether and constructed a Gantt chart after WBS is created. Now after that, I made use of the cost system to manage my budget. These key areas essentially contributed a major part in my organic waste management. I understood requirements and plan and finally decided to manage my cost that contributed to proper allocation, cost control and estimation required for this project. I believe that with proper cost management, my work will be contributed well within the time and allocated budget to enhance the full use of resources and managing expenditure. I noted down all the expenditure so that a comparison can be calculated to deliver a budget for proper execution. With this alternative it contributed to an adequate supply of resources from the right person at the right amount and also my funding needs were satisfied (Derenskaya, 2018). It contributed my project to be determinant, helped and integrated into the proper evaluation of profit under circumstances and also reduced the risk. It engaged in proper measurement of project performance by streaming the profit and optimizing the resources. After cost, risk management also well contributed to my work. With risk management, I was able to analyse the risk parts and correct it. It contributed and helped my project to understand possible risk in future events and also helped me to identify potential threats, weaknesses and opportunities. I enabled risk register which helps to manage each risk and proper actions were logged on to respond to that risk (Kerzner, 2017). Risk like the poor building of dustbins, storms or floods, poor management of cost, poor technical knowledge can lead to failure of the project. So with Risk management, proper analysis has been conducted on this project quality management assignment that helped me to solve these issues well.
Thus after interdependences and understanding key knowledge Areas, I evaluated certain key learning’s at my work while I was working on organic waste project quality management.
From understanding and identifying the stakeholders, I learnt that by taking stakeholders interest and concerns into action will help to improve my project and will make operations easier with ideas and methods. It will help in the continuous process of my project, understanding the effect and outcomes of it and thus satisfying the demands and expectations needed for the project (Ingason, 2015). By utilizing scope management I learnt that it will ensure my project requirements and identification are defined accurately and also well mapped by me to allocate proper work activities and cost for completing my project (Banker et al., 2017). The findings obtained from the study developed in this project quality management assignment made me understand that with effective scope management, I can avoid situations by defining and communicating the scope to everyone that are part of my project. It will help me to control and address the elements that are required for my initiation along with WBS structure to oversee the organic waste management very clearly and take actions. With proper cost management I learnt that while managing my project work organic waste control, resources and utilizing various initiatives were forecasted. Cost management made me learn the cost baseline for my project, and certain actions to keep my project on budget. It helped to learn how I can allocate, estimate and control my expenditure of different resources (Garcia & You, 2017). It made me learn to predict my future expenses to reduce cost over my project budget for proper execution.
With risk management, I learned proper accounting of project uncertainties and risk. It helped to evaluate project challenges and manage them with confidence and proper decision. I also learnt contingency planning that permitted me to control and predetermine risk. After proper determination of Key learning’s I evaluated the future application where I could use my experiences for future evaluation in projects. In future Applications, while I will be performing this similar kind of project again, I will utilize my understanding and key learning I gained from present execution. According to my experience, while working with this initiative mentioned in the project quality management assignment, I will apply the theory of proper stakeholder analysis with people that are willing to participate and contribute towards the work. I can apply my experience on stakeholder analysis to take proper decision in future, maintain time and trust and encourage proper risk management and accountability in my work (Hu et al., 2016). With my understanding of cost management, I will allocate and estimate a better budget for future work so that my project will be well determined and measured with increased profitability. I will deliver proper risk management concerning my understandings to properly account my future projects and identify risks uncertainties more adequately. It will help me to figure things without delay and document risk as well as responses effectively.
A proper analysis of important key tools was also performed in the research on project quality management assignment. I made use of stakeholder analysis, "cost baseline table", Risk register, "cost estimation table" and WBS structure as important tools. With the cost baseline table, I was able to access my work performance, evaluate my "Earned value calculation" and improve my estimation accuracy for future works (Mok et al., 2015). With the help of risk register, I can identify the risk, state them clearly and assess their importance during project evaluation. Similarly "cost estimation table" helped me to calculate the accurate cost, utilizes the techniques to translate the scope into the variables and made a cost approximation for resources required. WBS ("Work breakdown structure") structure helped me to reduce complexity while identifying and collecting resources and task, it identified and scheduled the work in simple method leading o progressive completion of work.
Conclusion
The overall conclusion developed from the above analysis done in the project quality management assignment leads to the understanding that main stakeholders are "City of Monash". It also cleared that waste from outside and industries are reused and redeem points, as well as discounts, are provided to houses that successfully engage in waste management. A stakeholder analysis was also done to understand the requirements and needs. In this project, the major crucial part was execution and controlling it with proper group analysis of food recycling. The project explored in the project quality management assignment was long and properly calculated and cost estimation was required. From function point determination, the total budget cost was little more than estimated with 565,320 AUD dollars. A risk management plan was created to find out internal risk and to get an idea of how to overcome them effectively.
Reference list
Banker, R.D., Byzalov, D., Fang, S. & Liang, Y., 2017. Cost management research. Project quality management assignment Journal of Management Accounting Research, 30(3), 187-209.
Derenskaya, Y. (2018). Project scope management process. Baltic Journal of Economic Studies, 4(1), 118-125.
Garcia, D., & You, F. (2017). Systems engineering opportunities for agricultural and organic waste management in the food-water-energy nexus. Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, 18, 23-31.
Hopkin, P., (2018). Fundamentals of risk management: understanding, evaluating and implementing effective risk management. Project quality management assignment Kogan Page Publishers.
Hu, X., Cui, N., Demeulemeester, E., & Bie, L. (2016). Incorporation of activity sensitivity measures into buffer management to manage project schedule risk. European Journal of Operational Research, 249(2), 717-727.
Ingason, H. T. (2015). Best project management practices in the implementation of an ISO 9001 quality management system. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 194, 192-200.
Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
Mok, K.Y., Shen, G.Q. & Yang, J., 2015. Stakeholder management studies in mega construction projects: A review and future directions. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), 446-457.
Radujkovi?, M. & Sjekavica, M., 2017. Project quality management assignment Project management success factors. Procedia Engineering, 196, 607-615.
Sadgrove, K. (2016). The complete guide to business risk management. Routledge.
Sunder M, V., 2016. Lean Six Sigma project management–a stakeholder management perspective. The TQM Journal, 28(1), 132-150.
Too, E., Le, T. & Yap, W., 2017. Front-end planning-The role of project governance and its impact on scope change management. Project quality management assignment International Journal of Technology, 8(6), 1124-1133.
