Managing Project Quality

Timothy J. Kloppenborg, Joseph A. Petrick

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781567263862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Investimenti e titoli
• Index: Business

Make breakthroughs in project quality by combining project management with quality management - this books shows you how. Guiding you from project initiation through closure, the book provides a detailed stage-specific flowchart of activities correlated with appropriate tools to give you new power to meet customer expectations and institutionalize project quality.

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 new theories 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.”¹ 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.”²

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:³

• 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 un...