Quality News » Project Management

The small business and Total Quality Management

QualityGuru — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:08:27 +0000

One apparent advantage of being relatively small is that you needn’t bother with the big nostrums that gurus and consultants love to sell to big companies. Or is it an advantage? What if TQM (Total Quality Management), say, is the right road to making money?

In many businesses, top-class quality is actually becoming the only road. If you’re supplying giants (for example, in cars) they may well insist on quality certifications like BS5750. Getting these can be expensive and burdensome; they don’t require plunging into TQM – but if you’re going to all that trouble, it makes sense to launch a total quality drive.

Total quality made much sense to Jack McGavigan, just retired, in his 80s, as chairman of John McGavigan & Co, founded by his grandfather in 1860. The family firm was a traditional printer, but developed from the Sixties into specialists in ‘graphics related plastics technology.’ Touch switches and backlit fascia panels in cars are examples of the uses. McGavigan, rightly keen on innovation, has constantly expanded into new technologies and product lines. Consequently, the group’s car parts have a 12% world market share.

None of this might have happened if McGavigan hadn’t reacted to impending crisis in mid-1987. Costs were rising, the company was being squeezed between strong suppliers and stronger customers, and competition was intensifying. The firm had been using quality circles for years – with employees banding together to tackle quality issues, Japanese-style, in a voluntary, bottom-up effort to improve. But more was needed to avert disaster.

Quality was the answer, passionately advocated by Edward Smith, 47. Managing director of John McGavigan Automotive Products, he joined the company as a stripling in 1963. ‘Employees are the experts’, he says. ‘We wanted to exploit the potential of people,’ which demands ‘training, teams and communication.’
read full text Thinking Managers

Basic Project Management tutorial with MS Project

QU-King — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:40:52 +0000

To get the most out of Microsoft Project we need to first
understand some common terms because ambiguity can cause confusion later as we
move through how to use Microsoft Project.

Project Management basics

Ambiguity is perhaps one of the greatest causes of failure of
projects. Ambiguity causes scope creep, missed deadlines, run-away costs,
under/over utilization of resources, and others. It’s your job as project
manager to identify and eliminate ambiguities, otherwise your project plan is
nothing more than a guess.

Let’s first look at what is and what is not a project. We’ll use the
definition of project from the Project Management Institute, which is:

A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or
service.

A project is consider temporary since once the projects objectives are met,
the project team will break-up and go onto other projects. The goal of a project
is to create something new, or unique.

Elements of Project Management

All projects have three basic elements: tasks, resources and time.
These are interrelated and any change in one has an effect on the other two.
This is one area where Microsoft Project excels. Whenever you make any changes,
the affect of those changes will become instantly visible through Microsoft
Project’s graphical presentation of your project.

Think of tasks as individual pieces of work which need to be done. Some
typical tasks may include:

Reports to management
Pieces of code for an application
Project definition documents
Any small (or large) item that contributes to reaching the state goal of
the project

Quality in software development

QU-King — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:35:10 +0000

Software development control

If developers and managers both want to create software that users love, why is it that so many shoddy software projects escape from the Quality Assurance department?

Quality in software development projects doesn’t happen on its own. It also doesn’t occur after a small group of heroes rides in on white horses and waves its shiny swords to vanquish the problems. Quality happens only when careful planning is done, when the entire project team maintains a quality-conscious approach every step of the way, and when problems don’t escape from the phase in which they were introduced. A quality product is a team effort. It’s planned and predictable. It’s without heroes, and it’s faster and cheaper than a low-quality effort.

How can this be? Let’s look at some sample projects. The first is a normal, low-quality, late project. We’ll call it project “Hurry Up” (HU for short).

Project HU got a bit of a late start due to the ongoing maintenance issues of its predecessor project “Just Ship It” (JSI). JSI was handled by a project manager (PM) who felt it was more important to ship on time than to ship a high-quality product. So he did. This PM was rewarded for his ability to “pull it together,” “get it out the door” and “meet the schedule.” The JSI PM was given a bonus for meeting his schedule and is now vacationing in Tahiti while the team deals with the fallout of the numerous bugs and unhappy customers.

Lesson #1: Don’t reward for shipping on schedule. Anyone can ship garbage. Base rewards on quality metrics.

During the last month of the project, the JSI developers worked 80-hour weeks. One heroic fellow was recognized for working 120 hours in one week, stopping only for brief rests. He heroically repaired multiple interfaces between applications. Those interfaces had not been properly specified (there were no design documents), no integration testing was done (no time to do it), and the QA team fought quality issues throughout system test.

Quality control vs. quality assurance

QU-King — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:18:32 +0000

Quality assurance vs quality control

Quality control and quality assurance are important concepts, yet most project managers have only a vague understanding of the meanings and the differences between these terms. Here’s what they mean.

Managing quality on your project means that you must first understand the specific quality expectations of your customer and then put a proactive plan in place to meet those expectations. The “proactive plan” contains a number of elements — the most important of which are the quality control and quality assurance activities that need to be performed.

Quality Control refers to quality related activities associated with the creation of project deliverables. Quality control is used to verify that deliverables are of acceptable quality and that they are complete and correct. Examples of quality control activities include deliverable peer reviews and the testing process.

Quality Assurance refers to the process used to create the deliverables, and can be performed by a manager, client, or even a third-party reviewer. Examples of quality assurance include process checklists and project audits. If your project gets audited, for instance, an auditor might not be able to tell if the content of a specific deliverable is acceptable (quality control). However, the auditor should be able to tell if the deliverable seems acceptable based on the process used to create it (quality assurance). That’s why project auditors can perform a quality assurance review on your project, even if they do not know the specifics of what you are delivering. They don’t know your project, but they know what good processes look like.
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