Contract #: N00178-07-D-5265
Award date: 23 May 2007
Quality Management System Description
TDA employs a Quality Management System (QMS) that provides management the necessary tools to monitor the quality and timeliness of services. The QMS consists of proven quality management practices that are applied throughout a project's life cycle. Our employees use QMS tools and principles to prevent problems and maximize effectiveness in all areas of project planning, project management, configuration management (CM), quality assurance (QA), metrics, process improvement, training and cost control.
TDA's key QMS activities consist of inspections, reviews, testing and auditing every project. The inspections are a special review process to detect defects. They involve formal and informal inspections, including peer review inspections using appropriate entry and exit criteria for each type of inspection. We conduct: periodic reviews of time, cost and performance parameters held usually a few days after the monthly project cost reports are available; topical reviews as mandated in the contract; and task progress reviews to assess technical details and compare actual versus planned expenditures for each task. The testing involves unit, configuration, integration and system testing as applicable to each project. The testing and auditing encompasses everything from simple unit testing to more comprehensive test plans for integration and system testing cases before customer acceptance tests.
The features of QMS include metrics for monitoring and reporting cost and managing the project. TDA's cost control and cost management is project-based; cost planning, cost tracking and variance tracking is carried out regularly on a project basis. Starting with the customer's requirements, total cost including labor, material and travel is first estimated using actual data when possible or from prior experience with similar projects carried out by TDA. A preliminary project estimate is made with assumed risks and submitted to the customer as the total project cost. Once the task is awarded, a kickoff meeting with accounting personnel initiates the project cost tracking. Ceiling limits of labor hours for each resource and cost are provided to the project manager for tracking cost and labor expenditures. Project scope changes or any other project changes that impact cost are immediately communicated to the customer and plans to accommodate these changes are then drawn. Weekly expended costs are compared to actual costs and reported to the project manager for appropriate actions.
|
