eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781567263862 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2002 |
| Series: | Project Management Essential Library |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 138 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Joseph A. Petrick, Ph.D., SPHR is Professor of Management at Wright State University, a frequent contributor to journals in the field of quality as well as co-author of key books, including Total Quality and Organization Development and Management Ethics: Integrity at Work.
Read an Excerpt
Managing Project Quality
By Timothy J. Kloppenborg, Joseph A. Petrick
Management Concepts Press
Copyright © 2002 Management Concepts, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56726-386-2
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Project Quality Management
Project quality management is the combination of two fields: quality management and project management. Many factors — such as external global competitiveness, dynamic environmental changes, increased task complexity, and internal productivity improvement — have driven the parallel and separate evolution of quality management and project management. Superior quality and project management optimize the performance excellence of organizations, but their combined leverage is often underutilized. Quality processes can be used to improve project performance. Leaders who master project quality management will have greater success both on individual projects and on a portfolio of projects for their organizations.
An introduction to project quality management requires a basic understanding of: (1) the histories of the quality management and project management fields; (2) the conceptual foundations of project quality management; and (3) the need for improvement in project quality management.
BRIEF HISTORIES OF QUALITY AND PROJECT FIELDS
The histories of quality management and project management provide a context for understanding their interrelationships.
History of Quality Management
Before the Industrial Revolution, skilled craftspeople made and inspected their own limited number of products and took pride in their holistic workmanship before selling to their customers. After the Industrial Revolution, unskilled workers were employed in an assembly-line manufacturing system that valued quantity of output, specialization of labor, and separation of worker from customer. Nevertheless, concern for efficient quality control persisted because military and civilian customers objected to substandard product variations, such as weapons that did not function in combat and telephones that did not function in the home.
To address civilian concerns about variation in telephone service in the 1920s, Walter Shewhart's team at Bell Telephone Laboratories developed newtheories and statistical methods for assessing, improving, and maintaining quality. Control charts, acceptance sampling techniques, and economic analysis tools laid the foundation for modern quality assurance activity and influenced the work of W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran.
After World War II, Deming and Juran introduced statistical quality control to the Japanese as part of General MacArthur's industrial base rebuilding program. They convinced top Japanese leaders that continually improving product quality through reducing statistically measured variation would open new world markets and ensure Japan's national future. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Japanese improved the quality of their products at an unprecedented rate while Western quality standards remained stagnant. The Japanese were culturally assisted by the Deming Prize, which was instituted in 1951 by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) to nationally recognize individuals and organizations that documented performance improvements through the application of company-wide quality control (CWQC). Starting in the late 1970s, the Japanese captured significant global market shares of the automobile, machine tool, electronics, steel, photography, and computer industries, in large part due to the application of quality management processes.
In a belated response to this quality-based, competitive threat from Japan, many U.S. organizations engaged in extensive quality improvement programs in the 1980s. In 1987 — some 34 years after Japan created the Deming Prize — Congress established the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), which provided a framework of seven categories (leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information and analysis, human resource focus, process management, and business results) to promote quality management practices that lead to customer satisfaction and business results. In 1987 as well, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted written quality system standards (the ISO 9000 family of standards) for European countries and those seeking to do business with those countries, and later enacted a registration procedure. These design, development, production, installation, and service standards have been adopted in the United States by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) with the endorsement and cooperation of the American Society for Quality (ASQ). In 1991, the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), in partnership with the European Commission and the European Organization for Quality, announced the creation of the European Quality Award to signal the importance of quality in global competition and regional productivity.
The integration of these quality approaches at all organizational levels was referred to as Total Quality Management (TQM) in the 1990s and continues today, along with a recent emphasis on bottom-line, focused Six Sigma quality — a level of quality representing no more than 3.4 defects per million process opportunities.
History of Project Management
At the same time that quality management was developing, many events led to the need for better project management. While projects have occurred throughout history (for example, Egyptian pyramid construction projects, Chinese garden design projects, Roman road construction projects), the need for a systematic field of study emerged in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, task complexity in dynamic environments in the defense, aerospace, construction, high-technology engineering, computer, and electronic instrumentation industries demanded formal project management skills at many levels. Previously, project management had been ad hoc at best. Now the need to address cost, schedule, scope, and quality concerns simultaneously forced companies and government organizations to develop more systematic and standard approaches.
In 1969, the Project Management Institute was formed to act as a forum for the discussion and exchange of project management experiences in different industries. In the 1970s and 1980s, the wide range of factors that prompted formal project management techniques surfaced: size of the undertaking beyond traditional functional resources, unfamiliarity of diverse efforts (e.g., crisis situations, takeover threats, major reorganizations), rapid market changes that put a premium on flexible, timely responsiveness, the interdependence and resource sharing necessary for the simultaneous engineering of new product innovations, and ad hoc team cooperation necessary to capitalize on a unique opportunity in conditions of uncertainty.
In 1981, the Project Management Institute formally recognized the development of uniform standards for management of projects as its responsibility and in 1987 it published A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK© Guide). Throughout all updated versions of the PBMOK© Guide, project quality management has been recognized as a separate, core knowledge area. Individuals who master the PMBOK© Guide and pass certification testing become Certified Project Management Professionals (PMP).
Other trends in the 1980s and 1990s increased support for project management skills. For example, project management teams were used to implement quality management process improvements, concurrent engineering required better scheduling techniques, decentralized change management and risk management decisions in restructured firms highlighted the contribution of the field project manager as opposed to the traditional middle manager, and the distinctive needs of co-located and multinational teams on ad hoc assignments favored project management structures. In addition, the expansion of project-driven techniques from divisions such as management information systems (MIS) and research and development (R&D) to marketing and engineering has pressured many organizations to shift from traditional, long-lived product management structures to more flexible, short-lived project management structures.
CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF PROJECT QUALITY MANAGEMENT
To understand these modern approaches in managing project quality, one must first understand the conceptual foundations of both quality management and project management. We cover those foundations next, followed by the four major project quality pillars that emerge from the conceptual foundations: (1) customer satisfaction; (2) process improvement; (3) fact-based management; and (4) empowered performance.
Conceptual Domain of Quality Management
One of the earliest approaches to project quality management occurred in ancient Babylon. During Hammurabi's rule, if a building collapsed, the architect and builder were both put to death. Fortunately, in modern times we focus more on preventing problems than claiming retribution if problems occur.
Quality has been defined as "the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs." The stated and implied quality needs are inputs into devising project requirements. However, quality and grade are not the same. According to the PMBOK© Guide, grade is "a category or rank given to entities having the same functional use but different technical characteristics."
Quality is a focus of project management. For example, a multimedia software program may be of high quality (no operational dysfunctions and an accurate accompanying manual) but be a low grade (a limited number of extra features). The mix of quality and grade is a responsibility of the project manager and his/her team.
Customer quality expectations in the manufacturing sector typically include the following factors:
• Performance – A product's primary operating characteristics
• Features – The "bells and whistles" of a product
• Reliability – The probability of a product surviving over a specified period of time under stated conditions of use
• Conformance – The degree to which physical and performance characteristics of a product match pre-established standards
• Durability – The amount of use one gets from a product before it physically deteriorates or until replacement is preferable
• Serviceability – The ability to repair a product quickly and easily
• Aesthetics – How a product looks, feels, sounds, tastes, or smells
• Perceived quality – Subjective assessment resulting from image, advertising, or brand names.
Customer quality expectations in the service sector typically include the following factors:
• Time – How much time must a customer wait?
• Timeliness – Will a service be performed when promised?
• Completeness – Are all items in the order included?
• Courtesy – Do front-line employees greet each customer cheerfully and politely?
• Consistency – Are services delivered in the same fashion for every customer, and every time for the same customer?
• Accessibility and convenience – Is the service easy to obtain?
• Accuracy – Is the service performed right the first time?
• Responsiveness – Can service personnel react quickly and resolve unexpected problems?
Since meeting or exceeding customer expectations and conforming to system design and specifications are crucial to quality, the analytical framework offered by the quality performance grid (see Figure 1-1) is helpful in depicting the relative parameters of achieved quality. In the grid, the vertical axis represents managerial performance quality with respect to meeting customer satisfaction expectations. The horizontal axis represents technical performance quality with respect to meeting design and system specifications. World-class quality requires high level (90 percent) mastery of both managerial and technical skills. Less than 50 percent success in either meeting customer satisfaction expectations and/or meeting design and system specifications is considered a quality performance failure.
Company X is shown as an example. Company X has satisfactory performance in both dimensions, but is far from world class. This quality performance grid can be used to ensure that a company is performing satisfactorily on both the managerial and technical dimensions of quality. It can also be used to identify where more effort is needed.
The cost of poor quality is the total amount of money a company spends to prevent poor quality (i.e., to ensure and evaluate that the quality requirements are met) plus any other costs incurred as a result of poor quality being produced. Poor quality can be defined as waste, errors, or failure to meet customer needs and system requirements.
The costs of poor quality can be broken down into the three categories of prevention, appraisal, and failure costs.
• Prevention costs: These are planned costs an organization incurs to ensure that errors are not made at any stage during the delivery process of that product or service to a customer. The delivery process may include design, development, production, and shipping. Examples of prevention costs include quality planning costs, information systems costs, education and training costs, quality administration staff costs, process control costs, market research costs, field testing costs, and preventive maintenance costs. The costs of preventing mistakes are always much less than the costs of inspection and correction.
• Appraisal costs: These include the costs of verifying, checking, or evaluating a product or service during the delivery process. Examples of appraisal costs include receiving or incoming inspection costs, internal production audit costs, test and inspection costs, instrument maintenance costs, process measurement and control costs, supplier evaluation costs, and audit report costs.
• Failure costs: A company incurs these costs because the product or service did not meet the requirements and had to be fixed or replaced, or the service had to be repeated. These failure costs can be further subdivided into two groups: internal or external failures.
Internal failures include all costs resulting from the failures found before the product or service reaches the customer. Examples include scrap and rework costs, downgrading costs, repair costs, and corrective action costs from nonconforming product or service.
External failures occur when the customer finds the failure. External failure costs do not include any of the customer's personal costs. Examples of these failure costs include warranty claim costs, customer complaint costs, product liability costs, recall costs, shipping costs, and customer follow-up costs.
Conceptual Domain of Project Management
Understanding the concepts of quality management is important as a basis for learning project quality management. Now we look briefly at the basics of project management. Projects are defined in the PMBOK© Guide as "temporary endeavors undertaken to create a unique product or service." The objectives of projects and operations are fundamentally different from a timing perspective. The focus of the project is to quickly achieve the objective and then terminate. The objective of an ongoing non-project operation is to sustain itself and the organization indefinitely.
A successful project is one that meets at least four criteria: schedule, budget, performance, and customer satisfaction. In other words, successful projects are those that come in on time, on budget, perform as expected by conforming to design specifications, and satisfy customers.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, project managers and their teams have been used to implementing quality management process improvements by relying on project lifecycles. While there are a variety of generic project lifecycle models, the authors have developed a new five-stage project quality process model, presented in Figure 1-2. The first and last stages are not currently in the PMBOK© Guide, but are crucial to project quality success and parallel other PMBOK© Guide recommendations for other core knowledge areas.
The five stages are:
1. Project quality initiation
2. Project quality planning
3. Project quality assurance
4. Project quality control
5. Project quality closure.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Managing Project Quality by Timothy J. Kloppenborg, Joseph A. Petrick. Copyright © 2002 Management Concepts, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Management Concepts Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Acknowledgments,
CHAPTER 1 Introduction to Project Quality Management,
CHAPTER 2 Project Quality Initiation,
CHAPTER 3 Project Quality Planning,
CHAPTER 4 Project Quality Assurance,
CHAPTER 5 Project Quality Control,
CHAPTER 6 Project Quality Closure,
CHAPTER 7 Summary and Challenges,
APPENDIX A Project Quality Participant Empowerment Readiness Assessment (PERA),
APPENDIX B Ethical Work Culture Assessment (EWCA),
Bibliography,
Index,