CQP Foundation Level
Quality Planning, Risks and Opportunities Management cheat sheet
Every chapter's key points, formulas and definitions on one page, for the last week before the exam. Each heading links to the chapter that explains it.
Introduction to quality planning
- KS ISO 9000 defines quality planning as the part of quality management focused on setting quality objectives and specifying the operational processes and related resources needed to achieve them.
- Juran's roadmap runs from establishing the project and its goals, through identifying customers, discovering and translating their needs and setting units of measure, to developing product features, process features and process controls, then transferring the plan to operations.
- A quality plan applies the standing quality management system to one specific object, such as a contract or a one-off export order; planning decides what conformity means, control checks whether it has been achieved.
- Planning is the only stage at which quality can be built in rather than inspected in, and the cost of correcting a decision rises by roughly an order of magnitude at each later stage.
- Clause 6.2.2 requires the organisation to determine what will be done, what resources are needed, who is responsible, when it will be completed and how the results will be evaluated.
Key terms
- Setting quality objectives
- Deciding what is to be achieved, in measurable terms, at each relevant function, level and process.
- Specifying operational processes
- Determining how the objective will be delivered: which processes, in what sequence, with what controls and acceptance criteria.
- Specifying resources
- Determining what people, infrastructure, environment, measuring equipment and knowledge the processes will need.
- Quality plan
- A document specifying which procedures and associated resources shall be applied by whom and when to a specific object, whether a project, product, process or contract. It is a plan for a particular thing, not a general system document.
- Quality planning against the quality management system
- The system, described in Quality Management Systems, is the standing arrangement. A quality plan applies that system to one specific case, adding whatever the case requires beyond it. A construction contract or a one-off export order typically gets a quality plan; routine production does not.
- Quality planning against quality control
- Planning determines what conformity means and how it will be achieved; control determines whether it has been achieved. Planning is prospective, control is concurrent.
The rest of the sheet covers
- Quality policy and quality objectives
- Risk and risk management
- Types of risk
- Quantitative analysis of risk
- Risk architecture and structure
- Risks and opportunities
- Managing risks and opportunities
- Worked examples
- Exam technique and revision
- Glossary