Telecommunications Project Management

1. Telecommunications Project Management Quality Management PERT

2. Quality • ISO 9000 • “Totality of feature and characteristics of a product or service that bears on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs” • Figure 20-1

3. Quality Control • Equipment design • Project quality ≠ Management of operations • Telecom: Service = Product • Project quality and Operations quality boundary unclear • Quality control • Verify project deliverables comply with standards set • Take action if needed

4. Telecom Quality Control Overlapping requirements • Network operations and maintenance • End-user experience • Include internal workers • If well executed and follow best practices may still lead to failure

5. Quality and Innovation • Identify demographics • Identify needs →Project specs • Sustaining innovations • Oral transmission of knowledge • Social interactions • Service platform innovations • More involved due to technology leap • More uncertainty • Disruptive innovations • Customer profile fuzzy & expectations tentative • Reinvent the “wheel” • Quality decisions pass from engineers to lawyers and accountants

6. Quality and Cost • Prevention cost – Cost of all activities to prevent known defects from affecting agreed service levels • Appraisal cost – Cost during evaluation of equipment due to inspections, tests, etc. • Failure cost – Cost of experiencing a failure during operation

7. Quality Examples • PSTN • Lasts 30 or more minutes & disrupts 1000 subscribers • Causes loss of service to a government response agency • Must report to the Network Reliability Council any outage that affects 30,000 subscribers >30 minutes

8. Quality Examples • Enhanced services (data, VoIP) • Defined by service level agreements (SLA) • More than 5% of active ports unusable for >30 minutes • More than 10% of active ports unusable • QoS agreements • Table 8.1

9. Service Release Management • Total Quality cost = Prevention cost + appraisal cost + failure cost <Upper bound cost of quality • Appraisal cost < Prevention cost + failure cost • Table 8.2

10. Quality Plan • Quality targets – performance limits within that service will meet sponsor’s objectives • Resources allocated for implementation – features & methods to be tested & expected behavior • Data collection – what to be complied • accuracy & relationship (I.e. hardware failures not included in software reliability) • Data analysis – track project progress

11. Quality Plan • Improvement plan – resolve difference between observed and desired behaviors • Communication – inform customer concerning project status • Retain methodology and information

12. Categorization of Defects: Urgency and Criticality Figure 8.1 Table 8.4

13. Appraisal • Unit/Module Tests • Functional Tests • Integration Tests • Systems/Software Quality Assurance test (SQA) • Customer Acceptance Testing

14. Telecom Non-Incremental Innovation • Figure 8.3

15. Evaluation of Testing Progress • Number of test cases executed, passed, failed and blocked • Progress • Percentage and number of tests passed • Number of unresolved critical or major defects • Number of defects without root cause analysis: could not be solved with available resources • Turnaround time for defect resolution

16. When to Stop Testing • Vendor fixed all critical defects discovered and all major defects that do not have acceptable workarounds • Finding of defects is typically zero after all tests • After all tests completed, expected number of critical or major problems less than predefined number

17. Vendor Management During Testing • Figure 8.10

18. Total Quality Management (TQM) • System for integrating organizational elements into: • Design • Development • Manufacturing efforts • Cost-effective products/services to customer • Externally – Customer oriented & provides customer satisfaction • Internally – Reduces production line bottlenecks and operating costs – improves product quality and organizational morale

19. Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) • Similar to Critical Path Method (CPM) • Requirements: • Individual tasks must be clear enough to put in a network (WBS) • Events and activities must be sequenced that allow critical and sub-critical paths (10 - >100) • Time estimates made on a three way basis • Optimistic, most likely, pessimistic • Critical path and slack times computed

20. PERT advantages • Extensive planning • Network development and critical path show interdependencies and problems otherwise hidden • Determine the probability of meeting deadlines by developing alternative plans • Ability to evaluate effect of changes • Large amount of sophisticated data presented in a well-organized diagram

21. PERT Disadvantages • Complexity adds to implementation problems • More data requirements • Expensive to maintain • Utilized most often on large, complex programs

22. Network Events and Activities • Event – milestone • Activity – Element of work that must be accomplished • Duration – Total time required to complete activity • Effort – Amount of work actually performed during duration • Critical Path – Longest path through the network and determines the duration of the project

23. Standard PERT terms • Figure 12-1

24. Gantt vs. PERT Chart • Figure 12-3

25. Series vs. Parallel PERT Chart • Figure 12-13

26. Expected Time Between Events te = a + 4m + b --------------- 6 te = expected time a = most optimistic time b = most pessimistic time m = most likely time

27. Estimate Total Project Time σte = b – a ------ 6 σte = standard deviation of the expected time Figure 12-15

28. PERT Disadvantages • End-item oriented – removes ability to make decisions • Unless repetitive project – little historical information to base cost estimates of most optimistic, most pessimistic, and most likely • Each division of organization may use its own method for estimating costs