PM FPX 5333 Assessment 3 Quality Analysis and Quality Assurance Plan

Analyzing Quality Standards of the Failed NEO Project

One of the simplest functions of Project Management is to find out whether or not the deliverable generated fulfills the specified quality requirements and the expectations of the Stakeholders. The NEO project at NearlyFree.com was not successful in terms of cost and schedule, and the fundamental issue was that the NEO System did not meet the definition of fitness for use as defined by Currie et al. (2025); therefore, users were unable to use the NEO System and thus did not complete their training before go-live. This section will explore the project’s initial quality standards and the shortcomings that caused the NEO project to fail in terms of quality.

Evaluation of Original Quality Standards

NEO Project did not have a formal quality management plan from the beginning, and there were therefore no documented quality standards to assess and/or accept the deliverables of the NEO Project. It was not referenced that the configuration of the Learning Management System (LMS) was based on ISO 9001 (quality management), ISO 9241 (user-friendliness) and/or IEEE 829 (software testing) quality management standards. Mohammadi et al. (2021) mention that QMP is a major risk factor in project failures, and it takes away an objective basis for making an acceptance decision. No standards existed, so the project team had no defined task to detect and report quality defects before delivery.

Although some informal quality expectations were likely set, they were not formally documented or easily measurable; no acceptance criteria were established for this LMS platform configuration in the project scope document, and therefore the delivery items were not subject to objective testing, but were subjectively reviewed; and the modules of content were accepted based on informal walkthroughs with stakeholders without undergoing structured usability testing or competency assessment. If the requirements are not documented, then they do not have an operational meaning; according to Serpico (2023), the measurement of quality depends on the extent to which the requirements are met. No measurable acceptance criteria were documented for the NEO Project, and this proved to be a problem because there was no way to check conformance to requirements during the delivery process.

• Impact of Missing Standards on Project Outcomes

It was not possible to deploy the NEO system to users due to the failure to define and enforce clear and appropriate non-functional requirements, leading to a multitude of downstream defects. One of the biggest blunders was to eliminate UAT from the project as a cost-cutting measure, essentially eliminating the final quality check before delivering the product. The project also removed the training and change management aspects, which meant that none of the organizational structures for supporting the residual usability issues that could have been present in the NEO system on deployment were retained. A study from Ford et al. (2023) on the cost of poor quality for IT projects revealed that 2 to 4 times the expenditures spent on preventative activities that were eliminated were also spent on re-work, failure remediation, and productivity losses due to the use of poor quality. The elimination of the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) step ($35,000 for the NEO project) directly helped to resume the entire project.

Analyzing Product Quality Against Quality Standards

• Product Quality Failures

The New Employee Orientation (NEO) system is not easy to navigate and use, according to the feedback received from new hires, which is not in compliance with the ISO 9241-11 standard (Effective, efficient and satisfying to intended users). Poor mapping of navigation routes between screens, no navigation between content for roles, and no mobile access (this was identified as a strategic priority) are examples of usability issues. Usability problems in human resources (HR) information systems (HRIS) can be especially damaging to new employees, as they lack knowledge of the organization’s culture and may rely on it to compensate for the lack of good interface design, according to Sposato et al. (2025). These weaknesses were not identified in theend-userr product/service experience because there was no formative usability testing conducted during NEO system development.

HRIS to LMS integration contained unresolved data mapping issues – role assignment and linking to content were not correct for some new hires. This failure to integrate the workflow of new hires was caused by not documenting the legacy HRIS schema, which was not reconciled to the needs of the LMS before the integration process started. The IEEE 829 standards for software testing documentation specify that integration testing must be carried out before the delivery of any system to end users, but this was not adhered to in the NEO project. The project led to an NEO system that would seem to operate perfectly during limited demonstrations by the vendor but failed to operate correctly when deployed to a live HRIS environment with real data.

The content of the e-learning modules was reworked three times without a sign-off process defined for subject matter experts, and no document control requirements were fulfilled. There was no structure to provide formal review of all required compliance content in the modules according to the competency framework used by the organization during onboarding, so no confidence in the modules being complete. Furthermore, according to Ștefan et al. (2024), document control is the foundation of the quality assurance process because when the content cannot be controlled or is not formally approved, its compliance and user-experience aspects are at risk. The quality issues that arose with NEO content could have been identified and avoided through a structured content review and approval process, but it was not developed for the NEO project.­

Recommending Additional Quality Standards for the Turnaround Project

There are 7 principles in the framework of a Quality Management System as per ISO 9001:2015. Customer focus, evidence-based decision-making, and continual improvement are key to all 7 principles. Documented quality objectives, acceptance criteria for each work package, and a formal nonconformance management process for defect detection and control are all linked and should be implemented together as part of an overall quality management system in implementing ISO 9001 to the NEO turnaround project. To incorporate the ISO 9001 quality principles in the NEO turnaround project, the following points were considered by Khatatbeh (2022): the quality objectives must be documented and developed for each work package of the project; acceptance criteria must be defined for each work package of the project; a formal nonconformance management process must be established to track and correct defects; all project employees must be trained and held accountable for following the project quality principles, such as quality manager, HR manager, etc. All other standards deal with more specific aspects of the overall quality framework, and the ISO 9001 quality principles are used to establish the quality management framework.

According to ISO 9241-11, usability is the capability of a specified user to use a specified product to achieve a specified goal within a specified situation with a specified level of effectiveness, efficiency and/or satisfaction. To apply ISO 9241-11 to the NEO System, there must be formal usability testing done with representative users during UAT, metrics collected throughout the usability testing which measure task completion rates, error rates and user satisfaction against thresholds, and two rounds of usability testing (experiments) performed on the NEO System: one during the development process and another before go-live, to assess whether the system meets the users’ needs or not, as suggested by Kamińska et al. (2022), who claim that HR technology should include at least two rounds of UAtoto be able to determine whether it is meeting the needs of the user or not. The usability issues that were found during the original NEO deployment have led to dissatisfaction with the new hires and are directly connected to the failure of the NEO System to be delivered as a usability-compliant system.

Agile quality assurance practices (TDD, defined acceptance criteria at the sprint level, continuous integration testing) have evolved a different methodology that allows for testing throughout the development process and not just at the end of a project as would be the case with a waterfall methodology. Incremental quality gates will be created, thereby avoiding the build-up of defects that may be discovered in the initial project, by defining work package criteria for every work package (LMS configuration, content development, etc.) using an agile methodology. PMI (2021) found that agile QA practices bring about reduced defect remediation costs compared to the waterfall approach because defects are detected and resolved as early as possible in the development process. So, in the context of moving toward NEO turnaround, agile practices can be used in the midst of the structured project schedule programming and design, and at the same time can give an entire methodology change to attain quality assurance.

Analyzing the Quality Assurance Plan of the Failed NEO Project

• Original QA Plan Deficiencies

The NEO project did not describe the means by which it would make quality a part of its projects. All NEO projects were only ‘reactive’ as judged on the quality of the individual’s impression. The NEO project schedule contained no quality checkpoints; there were no roles or responsibilities defined for quality assurance, and no quality metrics were set for the evaluation of the NEO projects’ progress. PMI (2021) requires that there be a quality management plan as part of the project management plan that describes how quality policies, processes, and procedures will be accomplished within the entire project life cycle. Since there was no quality management plan for the NEO project, quality was solely dependent upon individual team members’ informal judgment, resulting in no consistency or enough quality outcomes.

Also, the original project budget did not include anything for quality prevention and appraisal; the entire quality cost was in the form of quality failure costs due to the occurrence of defects after the project had been finished. The cancellation of the $35,000 UAT budget was a loss in prevention cost, as it would have been available as an even lower-cost method of identifying defects than the cost at which they would be identified after production. Alzoubi et al. (2022) have shown that measuring quality correctly, quality is free – the cost of defect prevention is always less than the cost of defect correction – and this is true for almost all kinds of IT projects. Cost of Quality could never have been tracked or budgeted without the NEO decision-makers knowing the need for a critical quality activity and being able to justify it in the face of cost pressures.

There were no formal criteria for every deliverable created during the original project in the NEO project. Therefore, no objective criteria existed to evaluate if a work package attained the standards of quality before it was carried over from one development phase to the next. Also, there were no quality gates (structured review points, at which a deliverable needed to show meeting of defined quality requirements before being allowed to proceed) to ensure that the deliverables would be of defined quality at the relevant points in the NEO project. According to Shoar and Payan (2021), one of the three most common causes of IT project failure is a lack of quality gates; therefore, when defects are found later in development, it costs exponentially more to correct the defects than it would to correct the defects at the time they are found in the work package. The absence of quality gates allowed the NEO project to pass through five phases of development prior to identifying quality failures and thus spending more to correct the defects than the amount of funds that were allotted for the project.

Developing a New Quality Assurance Plan for the NEO Turnaround

• Cost of Quality Analysis

Organizations classify their expenditures related to quality as a result of Cost of Quality (COQ) into four different classes: prevention, appraisal, internal failure, and external failure, according to the Cost of Quality (COQ) framework. Based on Helmold’s (2023) findings, businesses that invest sufficient resources in prevention and appraisal will reduce their total COQ by 3-5 times. Early detection and correction of defects or faults is much cheaper than post-production correction. Most of NEO’s original project quality costs were classified as the most significant category of external failure cost; this was due to NEO’s lack of investment in prevention and appraisal. Therefore, to reduce the external failure costs experienced during the turnaround phase, the revised QA plan focuses on making investments in prevention and appraisal early in the turnaround process.

• Table 1

Cost of Quality Analysis — NEO Turnaround Project

• Long-Term Benefit of Prevention and Appraisal Investment

The investment in prevention and appraisal activities in the revised QA plan amounts to $60,500, which will be used to reduce external failure costs by 70% or more compared to the expected failures from the original project. According to ASQ (2022), for every $1 spent on prevention, an organization will typically prevent between $3 and $8 of failure costs, giving them an ROI from Prevention of between 300% and 800% over the life of the project. Based on the defect remediation history of the previous project, in the case of NEO, the investment of $18,500 in UAT is expected to identify and fix defects at a cost of about $55,000 to fix after deployment. The COQ should be measured as a project metric to give a basis for quality budget management when the pressure of costs arises, and should be monitored from the project’s initiation.

• Systematic QA Activities and Checkpoints

The QA plan calls for a total of four quality checkpoints, all of which are in step with the delivery schedule of the NEO project (eight Phases). Specific criteria, or conditions, exist for each quality checkpoint as well as a quality owner, ensuring that quality gates are real decision points and not mere process routines. According to PMI (2021), the systematic QA Activities should be preventative AND detective; the preventative activities should be focused on reducing the likelihood of an error, while a detective activity would be one that would detect the error even if the preventative activity was performed. The Four Quality Checkpoints will be specific to the type of Quality Failures seen in the NEO Post-Mortem.

• Table 2

Systematic QA Checkpoints — NEO Turnaround Project

QA Across the Project Lifecycle

• Initiation Phase

The Quality Management Plan is a required deliverable of the Project Charter and, once the project begins, is a necessary component of the project. It defines the quality standards, roles and responsibilities, and metrics that will be used on this project before undertaking any technical effort. The Cost of Quality (COQ) budget will be established formally and approved, and will be considered a line item (no changes without the Change Control Board). Aulin et al. (2025) state that quality planning in initiation is the most leveraged quality investment, and the decisions made in this phase will impact the cost and complexity of all future quality activities. A formal lesson from the original Project’s failure will be added to the Quality Management Plan to ensure that the same failure does not happen again.

• Planning Phase

The lack of measurable, quantitative standards of quality in the original project will be overcome by introducing acceptance criteria during the planning stage of each work package in the BS (work breakdown structure). Quality checkpoints will be formally planned in the project schedule, and specific people, time, and resources will be assigned to each quality checkpoint, which will not be available for elimination without an official scope change request. The results of the activities related to Quality Management should be: 1) Quality Plan; 2) Quality Metrics Register; and 3) Process Improvement Plan, which will be created before the start of the project execution for NEO turnaround. The COQ tracking template will be finalized during planning and will be part of the monthly financial reporting cycle.

• Execution Phase

During the implementation of the project, there will be continuous QA activities at the work package level, based on the sprint-level definition-of-done criteria identified at Checkpoint #2 above. The steering committee will be given status reports every two weeks, providing information on defect rates, test coverage, and COQ expenditures versus planned, which will enable the identification of quality degradation earlier. The defects that reach UAT are fewer in number because the continuous monitoring of the delivery throughout the execution leads to a reduction in delivery time at UAT and saves the remediation cost during UAT (Srinivas et al, 2024). A quality audit will be carried out by Quinn, and reports will be submitted to the Change Control Board within 48 hours if any quality deviation is found beyond a defined threshold.

• Closeout Phase

A quality audit will be conducted at the end of the project to verify that all requirements to accept the project are satisfied, and that documentation of the required approvals for all quality gates in the project official record. Quality post-project will be tracked for 60 days (hypercare) based on user satisfaction scores, defect rate, and helpdesk tickets per week compared to the quality targets defined in the quality management plan. Bauer (2024) states that the quality of IT (information technology) project closeout reviews should be documented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the QA (Quality Assurance) process and lessons learned to be used by the project for future quality planning. The final Cost of Quality (COQ) analysis will be completed and presented to Felix as a financial accountability document indicating ROI (return on investment) of investments into prevention and appraisal costs versus actual failures that have occurred.

Conclusion

Several factors contributed to quality problems with the NearlyFree.com NEO project, such as there was no formal quality management plan in place, there were no defined quality criteria, and no quality appraisal. These issues were caused by an underlying lack of investment in quality assurance processes and systems (i.e., due to cost pressures). These issues can be corrected and prevented by implementing ISO 9001 and ISO 9241-11 standards, which require making investments in the field of quality assurance (total cost of quality – COQ) in the early stages of the project (approx. $60,500) and introducing 4 mandatory quality checkpoints (by linking quality to the project life cycle). Quality is not a coincidence; it is planned, executed, and measured. The revised QA plan will guarantee that the NEO turnaround project will deliver a technically robust, end-user validated and organizationally-supported system at the time ofgo-livee.

For the 2nd and 4th assessment of this class visit: PM FPX 5333 Assessment 2 or PM FPX 5333 Assessment 4