144 Part II: Planning Your Software Project Probably (Photo web hosting)
144 Part II: Planning Your Software Project Probably not. We can pretend that the ideal sale price for this piece of software is $25 per copy. A business analyst would determine the market size, the percentage of the market that would actually buy the software, and predict the gross profit on your software. The analyst would then work with you to determine how long and how much it d take to actually create the software. The difference between the actual costs of the software creation and the actual sales is the net profit. Now you re getting to optimal quality. The gross profit would have to be greater than the costs to create the software or there s no return on investment (ROI). The optimal quality, in this instance, is how much quality should be built into the software while still allowing for a profit margin. Ideally, the cost of quality is much lower than the final profit margin. That s the equation that keeps businesses in the black. Optimal quality, fun as it is, has two related costs for you to consider: Cost of quality: This is the amount that you have to spend to achieve optimal quality. Chalk up expenses like time for planning, development, and testing, but don t forget the cost of training or direct project expenses like hardware and software. Of course, you can t forget to pay third parties, such as quality assurance testers and consultants like your business analyst. Cost of nonconformance to quality: This is the cost assigned to wasted labor, wasted materials, and rework when your project team delivers poor and faulty code. This cost also ripples out to a loss of sales because of errors, returns, and unhappy customers who bought and relied on your lousy software. When it comes to quality, your goal as a project manager is to first determine the project scope in relation to the cost and required schedule. Then you ll have to consider the costs required to achieve the expected level of quality. In some instances, you ll have to examine the profit margin expected in order to realize what the optimal quality for your project should be. Some project managers worry that if they train their staff they ll leave the company to work for the competition. Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said, Which is worse: training your staff and potentially losing them or not training your staff and keeping them? Considering quality when making changes One of the biggest influences on quality is changes to the project scope. We discuss change control at length in Chapter 13, but this section explains why you should consider project quality when approving changes. Don t get the
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