Quality and Risk

Question

Trying to understand the entailment between Quality and Risk, can we state that

"Non Conformance to Quality Leads to Materialization of Risk (Known/Unknown)"?

If this statement is true, how concrete is it?

Answer 1

As with everything else in the project, you have two types of risks that affect quality. The first is aleatory risk, which is random variation that you cannot reduce. This type of risk would affect performance, in that there is variability in the creation of the product that would produce variability with quality specifications. You would have some defined tolerance on that spec that would define the limits; anything outside would be rejected, but those inside would be accepted despite varied results. That variation can become a risk factor of other downstream risks, too.

The other type of risk is epistemic, discrete drivers that can impact quality. This could be like using a known human resource that does not have the requisite skills, which can then cause products out of spec limits. This, too, then becomes a risk factor of other downstream risks.