10.8. Key Terms
Key Terms
- Actual Costs: this refers to the completed work. Is the easiest of the inputs to understand.
- Benchmarking: means using the results of quality planning on other projects to set goals for your own.
- Cause-and-effect Diagrams: help in discovering problems based on variation.
- Control Charts: used to define acceptable limits.
- 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.
- Cost Performance Index (CPI): provides an indicator of the overall cost performance to date and a good idea of how the project work is trending with regard to cost performance.
- Cost Variance (CV): is the first of two basic variances that can be calculated once EV, PV and AC have been determined for an activity or project. CV is simply the Earned Value minus the Actual Costs.
- Cost-benefit analysis: is looking at how much your quality activities will cost versus how much you will gain from doing them.
- Design of Experiments: is the list of all the kinds of tests you are going to run on your product.
- Earned Value: Refers to the cost of work completed on an activity which can be found by multiplying the percentage of completed work for a given activity by the planned value for the same activity.
- Earned Value Analysis (EVA): is a monitoring and controlling process that compares project progress to the project baseline (original plan). EVA measures the performance of a project in terms of cost and schedule.
- Planned Value: Refers to the expected cost that will be spent on the project over its lifetime.
- Quality: is “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfill requirements.”
- Schedule Performance Index (SPI): provides an indicator of the overall schedule performance to date.
- Schedule Variance (SV): is the second of two basic variances that can be calculated once EV, PV, and AC have been determined for an activity or project. SV is simply the Earned Value minus the Planned Value.
- Statistics: the mathematical interpretation of numerical data—are useful when interpreting large numbers of measurements and are used to determine how well the product meets a specification when the same product is made repeatedly.
- Tolerances: are often written as the mean value, plus or minus the tolerance. The plus and minus signs are written together, ±.
