Project quality update

IN THE PAST YEAR, I’ve seen a number of changes in how quality concepts and tools are being integrated into project and program management—not quality defined narrowly in terms of quality planning, assurance and control, but more broadly. In this article, we’ll look at how quality in this broader sense has impacted program and project management.

Competitiveness is Driving Project and Quality Management. All companies, plants, and project teams have to be competitive if people are going to buy their products or services. Competition and increasing customer requirements are challenging managers, employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders to look at activities in new ways and to find new methods for doing things more effectively, efficiently, and economically. Project management has seen explosive growth because it provides proven principles, policies, and methods to improve competitiveness.

Quality is key to organizational and project success. According to a Harvard Business Review article by Andrall E. Pearson [“Corporate Redemption and the Seven Deadly Sins,” HBR, May/June 1992, pp. 65–75], the seven deadly sins leading to competitive loss are:

■ Inconsistent product quality

■ Slow response to the marketplace

■ Lack of innovative, competitive products

■ Uncompetitive cost structure

■ Inadequate employee involvement

■ Unresponsive customer service

■ Inefficient resource allocation.

Multiple Perspectives of Quality. Always define your terms. The old standby definition of quality was “conformance to requirements,” but that’s changing. We’re seeing a broader definition and use of the concept of “project quality.” So, let’s look at the broader definition of quality, which has expanded as more organizational teams use project and process management to do their critical work. Depending on what a project team is tasked to do, the definition of quality may differ. Quality is commonly defined in terms of the following perspectives: perceived excellence, market or customer centric, conformance (compliance), value-based.

Examples of ways of viewing and implementing quality can be seen in the “What Is Quality?” sidebar and will be explored in this article.

Each project team in an organization may interpret the word “quality” differently, which affects its implementation. A Marketing project team may take a user or customer approach to the subject. Engineering and Manufacturing project teams would pursue a conformance approach to the subject. Purchasing project teams may take a value-based approach.

Process Management = Quality Management. Businessperson Richard S. Johnson said that “Leadership is the act of taking people somewhere with an idea—visioning them into the future and then taking them there.”

There has been much soul-searching about the effectiveness of project management to drive operational performance and profitability. Too often, projects are treated as separate activities or initiatives apart from core business processes. As stand-alone activities, projects and project management are given less priority than customer satisfaction and cost-reduction initiatives.

There is much more concern about integrating project management into an organization’s long-term business objectives, core competencies, and business plans, as well as daily operations. How is this being done? We’re seeing the integration of project management with the management of core processes. Process management involves elements of capability maturity models, Six-Sigma quality, stakeholder satisfaction, quality standards, quality planning, and quality auditing.

Capability Maturity Models. Andrew Grove, Intel’s CEO, put it pretty well when he said, “One way to increase productivity is to do whatever we are doing now, but faster … There is a second way:We can change the nature of the work we do, not how fast we do it.”

Every consultancy is trying to differentiate itself from its competition. They are developing their own capability maturity models and methodologies. The capability maturity model is a process-based concept that originated in the quality world, then migrated into software, and then into project management.

The basic idea behind these models or methodologies is that an organization or team can be classified in terms of its use of consistent processes. At the lowest maturity level, organizations do their work through ad hoc relationships or informal protocols. These work well as long as there is little complexity. As complexity increases through more people, higher costs, critical schedules, there is a higher chance for project chaos and inevitably failure. What to do about it? Create consistency through stable, consistent, and improving processes.

Growth in Program Offices. Everything is interconnected, linked. Just let one domino fall, and witness the others in the chain topple. The need for stable processes has encouraged the growth of program offices and program management, which are tasked to manage a number of projects. What’s the fundamental purpose behind program management? A project may be unique and constrained by a finite budget and time frame for completion. But, a project is also composed of complex and interrelated activities that must be coordinated.

The process approach behind program management ensures that independent and interdependent projects can work together to deliver on time and on budget quality products and services that satisfy customers’ wants, needs, and expectations. The goal is to simplify the complex relationships and manage the interface among multiple projects.

Key to Project Controls. Process thinking is fundamental to all project variance control and trend analysis. The project team can easily detect trend lines, variances, and unusual project spikes if project processes have been stabilized.

Process thinking is also critical to “management by exception.” Stable project processes allow the project manager to focus attention on the “critical few” project variables and activities instead of the “trivial many.” The project team will identify, monitor, and stabilize these critical project variables. If there is an unusual occurrence, the source of the problem is discovered and eliminated through auditing, corrective action, and preventive processes.

Six-Sigma Quality. How important is it to strive for quality? Attorney Marisa Manley put it pretty succinctly when she said, “You may never achieve zero defects. But if you want to avoid lawsuits, try to reach that goal.”

General Electric popularized Six-Sigma quality about three years ago to improve manufacturing quality. Now, we’re seeing the concept moving into service, administrative, and design projects. Six-Sigma quality often is found in highly mature program and project management environments with highly developed processes.

What’s Six-Sigma? It’s a set of statistical prevention and control methodologies that can be used to ensure very high reliability, performance, usability, and maintainability. Six-Sigma is used to establish highly consistent project processes so that nonconformances are at parts per million levels, specifically 3.4 parts per million (PPM) or less.

Quality Standards. Standards ensure there is harmony and compatibility among teams, projects, services, and products across and within national boundaries. A standard may be a technical specification or may be a template for a project system or process. Quality standards define technical, service, delivery, contractual, functional, dimensional, and other requirements to ensure customers are satisfied.

Let’s illustrate this. Technical quality standards may establish uniformity by minimizing variation among projects, products, and services. These standards allow nuts to be threaded onto bolts, software to work with different printers, and camera film to be processed in different countries.

Or, quality standards can define project processes and systems. More companies are becoming ISO 9000 certified and requiring their projects to establish ISO processes. ISO 9000 is a basic quality system to prevent deficiencies and to meet customer requirements. A major benefit of this trend is that ISO 9000 standards can form the foundation for more robust project quality processes.

In general, standardization improves project consistency; ensures that requirements are understood and followed; creates uniform quality systems; is used to monitor, control, and improve critical project features that directly affect customer satisfaction; provides a mechanism to control risks; and develops self-discipline.

Quality Planning. In the last several years, I’ve seen many projects become free electrons and go into orbit. What do I mean? They were initially chartered to do “X.” Over time, the project wandered from the original objective because of poor leadership, creep, and a host of other reasons. The project got a life of its own, much different from its original charter. No one wanted to pull the project plug and in the process commit professional suicide.

The organizational question now is how to keep projects focused and on task. I’m seeing more project teams develop quality plans that focus on satisfying specific stakeholder requirements. In some cases, the plan becomes the overarching project document to achieve and ensure stakeholder satisfaction, eclipsing cost and scheduling tools.

Quality planning basically is the process of defining project objectives that are aligned with stakeholder requirements and strategic business objectives. The quality plan establishes a road map for meeting the objectives. According to G. Dressler’s Management Fundamentals [1985, Reston Va.:Reston Publishing Co., p. 55–58], quality planning is important because it:

■ Provides direction. Quality planning provides project direction and a road map to deliver quality.

■ Provides a structured framework. Quality planning provides a structured framework for decisions related to quality. Without a framework or plan, the quality initiative is rudderless and cannot achieve its goals.

■ Reveals opportunities. Quality planning reveals opportunities to improve project efficiency, reduce costs, or please customers.

■ Facilitates quality control and assurance. Contingency quality planning anticipates potential problems. Once areas of potential problems are discovered, plans can be developed to prevent their recurrence.

Stakeholder Satisfaction. Here’s what Don Peterson, president of Ford Motor Co., has to say about stakeholder satisfaction: “The heart and soul of competing is knowing how to appeal to your customers.”

Several years ago the Boston Consulting Group surveyed a group of businesses and concluded that 95–99 percent of a company’s activities have little or no relevance to the final customer. This is an astounding number when one considers that all organizations are using project management to add value and satisfy final customer requirements. The final customer doesn’t really care what a company does to provide a product or service as long as it satisfies real and perceived needs.

The need to continue satisfying and pleasing customers has become part of the conventional business wisdom. The wisdom of this statement is so ingrained that there is no reason to defend or support this contention. It is widely understood. The only question is, “How?” And, the conventional answer is, “By stakeholder-focused project and process management.”

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As well, a project these days must do more than satisfy customers. A project must deal with and address the concerns of its stakeholders, which may include share-holders, customers, employees, community, suppliers, and regulators.

Results and Measurement. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Project quality metrics should be tied to what matters to the organization, which may be customer satisfaction, time-to-market, profitability, cost reduction, or operational effectiveness. If noncritical or nonessential activities are measured, progress and ultimately the rationale of the project may be questioned. Overmeasurement may be as critical as undermeasurement. Some project teams measure everything in sight and invariably control nothing, or the wrong project variables.

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It has become conventional management wisdom that excellent companies measure critical processes, systems, and products. What should be measured? Theoretically, thousands of factors, elements, attributes, features, and characteristics throughout a project can be measured. But, what critical data should be measured, collated, and analyzed? As a general suggestion, these include critical project and process characteristics that deal with high risk, customer satisfaction, or health/safety/environmental issues. The typical quality measures are reliability, maintainability, product quality characteristics, process capability, cost of quality, return on quality, first-pass yields, time to market, design costs, customer-defined quality, and fit and function.

Quality Auditing. As the size and criticality of projects increase, risks exponentially increase. Quality audits are the most effective techniques used to monitor project quality.

A quality audit is an official examination of the quality processes, products, or people to verify effectiveness and compliance to policies, procedures, work instructions, specifications, and so on. Audits can be performed on a periodic or random basis and can be performed unannounced or upon request.

Once the audit is conducted, audit findings are documented in a report that is circulated to authorized clients. The audit report may recommend corrective action, preventive action, or no action. The advantages of audits are that they supply independent and objective advice to program management; monitor corporate, plant, supplier operations, and products; provide follow-up on corrective action; identify areas of quality improvement; and measure effectiveness of project people, processes, and products [ANSI/ASQC, “Quality Systems—Model for Quality Assurance in Design, Development, Production, Installation, and Servicing—Q9001, 1994, p. 1].

Prevention and Process Improvement. Defect prevention is a major quality objective of highly capable project processes. Quality as “conformance to specifications” cannot be assured or controlled by inspecting quality into the product after the fact. Inspectors check, sort, rework, rehandle, and reinspect defective products. This is wasteful, because it consumes time, effort, expense, material, personnel, and facilities.

In an employee involvement atmosphere, project team members have more responsibility and authority to control product and service quality. The current truism is that quality rests with each project team member. Project teams that focus on prevention and process improvement create working conditions that allow employees to make decisions that enhance their project environment.

Several examples may illustrate this: In one manufacturing plant, project teams manage/build highly specialized “one off” products. Team members called “quality associates” inspect their own work and act as the quality control for the project team ahead and the team behind on the production line. Parts go through continuous quality inspection by each employee.

Or, customer satisfaction cannot be guaranteed by instructing a salesperson in courtesy after the sale. The salesperson or receptionist should have been instructed in policies and procedures before the assignment.

I’VE BEEN THROUGH MANY FADS, including Total Quality Management, Material Requirement Planning, Management By Objectives, Total Quality Service, Continuous Process Improvement, and so on. Project management has been growing like crazy. There are lots of data points to confirm this: PMI^® membership has climbed steadily over the last five years; shrink-wrapped project software has been flying off the shelves. But, we should be careful. Project management may become faddish; much like quality management did 10 years ago. When a management tool is overpromoted, there’s a good chance it may become a fad unless it adds sustaining organizational value. And that’s the challenge project management faces now.

Ten years ago, quality faded because organizations focused on the tools and didn’t address organizational processes and systemic issues. Quality became a set of tools in search of applications. Organizations tried quality and lost interest when they didn’t receive instant business gratification. And that’s where we are now. We’re hearing of too many project failures. Project management gurus should de-emphasize the hoopla and publicity surrounding project tools. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the quality movement it is that project processes aligned to organizational goals are the solution. ■