PM 340 Week 2 Delivering Scope and Quality Example

Accurate, Accessible and Built to Last: Delivering Scope and Quality for an Ice Age Gallery

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PM/340: Project Delivery and Measurement

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Prairie River Museum of Natural History, its gallery, requirements and costs are composites written for a model paper.

The Prairie River Museum of Natural History, the invented Omaha museum from Week 1, is in the final months of building its 9,000-square-foot hall of Pleistocene mammals, with a $3.8 million budget and a fixed opening before spring break. Fabrication is far along and installation has begun. The question now is not only whether the gallery will be finished, but whether it will be accepted: accurate enough for the curators, safe enough for the loaned fossils, accessible to every visitor and engaging enough to justify donors' gifts. This paper applies the delivery performance domain to that question.

The Delivery Domain

The current standard describes the delivery performance domain as the work of delivering the scope and quality the project was undertaken to achieve, with the aim of producing the intended outcomes (Project Management Institute [PMI], 2021). It covers how requirements are understood, how scope is defined and changed, how quality is planned and how deliverables are accepted. For the museum, delivery means a gallery that meets its requirements on opening day and keeps meeting them over a planned 20-year life.

Requirements and Their Owners

The team gathered requirements through curator workshops, a review of the university lender's loan conditions, an accessibility audit by a consultant, visitor surveys from the old dinosaur hall and the city's building code review. They fall into five groups, each with an owner and a test:

Scientific accuracy (lead curator): every label, model and illustration reviewed by two curators; reconstruction of the short-faced bear checked against published skeletal measurements.

Conservation (registrar and conservator): case interiors held at 40 to 55 percent relative humidity and light on fossils kept at or below a set level, verified by data loggers for two weeks before specimens go in.

Accessibility (facilities manager): case heights, reach ranges and clear floor space checked against the federal accessibility standards; all video captioned; tactile casts at each section.

Visitor experience (education director): each interactive used successfully by at least 8 of 10 test visitors without help.

Building codes (facilities manager): egress widths, fire ratings for scenery materials and electrical inspection passed.

Defining Scope Two Ways

The casework, scenery and mounts are defined by approved drawings and a breakdown of deliverables: 31 cases, four scenic walls, the mammoth mount, lighting and graphics. Each deliverable has acceptance criteria drawn from the requirements above. Changes go through the change process described in Week 1.

The three interactive stations are defined differently. Their content is held in a ranked list managed by the education director, and the media studio builds them in short cycles. A station is done when its content is approved by a curator, its controls pass the accessibility checks, it has been tested with visitors and it has run for 72 hours without a fault. This split mirrors the hybrid thinking of the standard: fixed definition where the work is well understood and evolving definition where visitors must show the team what works (PMI, 2021).

A requirement that cannot be tested is a hope, and hopes are hard to accept on opening day.

Building Quality In

Quality planning focused on prevention. Graphics files go through a two-curator review before printing, because a reprinted panel costs about $1,400 and delays installation. Case mock-ups were built and tested for seal and humidity before full production. The fabricator's shop runs a checklist on each case before shipping, and the project manager, Teresa Whitfield, or her deputy inspects a sample at the shop every three weeks.

Love and Edwards (2004) studied rework in building projects in Australia and found that rework arose largely from design changes, errors and omissions and that its costs were substantial. Hwang et al. (2009) analyzed data from construction projects and reported that rework from owner changes and design errors was a significant source of cost growth. A museum gallery is a small construction project with unusual finishes, so these findings support spending on reviews and mock-ups early rather than on fixes later.

Cost of Quality

The team estimated the cost of quality for the gallery:

Prevention: curator reviews, case mock-ups, the accessibility audit and staff training, about $46,000.

Appraisal: shop inspections, data logger testing, visitor tests of interactives and code inspections, about $38,000.

Internal failure (found before opening): budgeted at about $25,000 for reprints and case adjustments.

External failure (found after opening): estimated from the old hall's history at $60,000 or more over the first two years if prevention were skipped, from replaced graphics, case repairs and visitor complaints.

Spending about $84,000 on conformance, a little over 2 percent of the budget, is expected to keep failure costs well below what the museum experienced with its last gallery, where a mislabeled specimen drew press attention and humidity problems forced two cases to be rebuilt.

Testing With Visitors

The education director ran three rounds of prototype testing with families and school groups using cardboard and laptop versions of the interactives. The first round showed that children could not reach the dig-sample drawers on one station; the drawers were lowered. The second showed that a mammoth tooth identification game used vocabulary too advanced for its audience; the text was simplified. The third round, with a group of visitors who are blind or have low vision, led the team to add audio descriptions to the tactile casts and to raise the contrast of the floor markings that guide people between sections. Each finding was fixed at a cost of a few hundred dollars, before the studio built the final hardware.

Acceptance

Each deliverable is accepted in writing by its requirement owner on the evidence named in the test. Cases are accepted when logger data meet conservation limits for two weeks; specimens are then installed. The sponsor, the museum's deputy director, accepts the gallery as a whole after the building inspection, a curator walk-through and a full-day soft opening for members.

Conclusion

Delivering the gallery means delivering requirements, not just objects. By assigning owners and tests to every requirement, defining scope in the way that suits each kind of work, building quality in through reviews, mock-ups and visitor testing and pricing prevention against failure, the museum aims to open a gallery that its curators, conservators, visitors and donors will all accept.

References

Hwang, B.-G., Thomas, S. R., Haas, C. T., & Caldas, C. H. (2009). Measuring the impact of rework on construction cost performance. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 135(3), 187-198. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9364(2009)135:3(187)

Love, P. E. D., & Edwards, D. J. (2004). Determinants of rework in building construction projects. Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, 11(4), 259-274. https://doi.org/10.1108/09699980410547612

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.