HOW CAN YOU ENSURE THAT QUALITY REMAINS ON THE AGENDA?

˜Quality requirements have been woven through the material in this book.' This simple statement might not seem particularly important. However, it demonstrates an attitude to quality that all project managers should adopt. Quality needs to be built into the project, not bolted on as an afterthought. Building quality in can be a difficult concept but it doesn't have to be. Understanding what is meant by quality is something that project managers often fail to do. Quality is simply something doing what it is supposed to do. Sadly, quality is frequently thought of only as an abstract concept. It is described as something that you intuitively know is there. For most project managers it is something that's not really being measured. As noted in the definition of the strategy for quality, this is not an acceptable position for you as the manager of an advanced project to adopt. Quality is measurable, it is tangible and it is achievable.

Quality can be achieved partly by using good processes. Processes spell out how tasks should be undertaken and ideally they set the minimum level of quality to be achieved. However, this is only half of the story. Perhaps the more important part is the passion that the project team need. The team need to have a passion if they are to end up with a quality product. Passion is a culture within an organization and it should be built into the fabric of how the advanced project operates. Those in the project should be striving to achieve their best work at all times. You must lead this passionate charge from within the project. This is especially true for an advanced project. The passion must come from the very top.

In practical terms, passion means that it is vital that you pick up on all aspects of poor quality. You must pick up every detail of the project and demand the best from the team. This covers everything including, for example, the quality of the prose within the project documents. For instance, project managers should send back for revision documents that are poorly laid out and difficult to read. They should do this even if the content of the material is correct and acceptable. They must set high standards in everything if they are to ensure that a quality product will be achieved. Although this may seem petty to the project team member concerned , it forces the person to understand that you care about the detail.

Adopting a mindset that demands high quality means that you must find within yourself a passion for the project. You need a passion for excellence in everything. You must have a passion for every deliverable of the project. You must learn to express shock at being offered poor work. It is, after all, through your actions that others will take their lead. If you pick up on poor work then the work package managers will pick up on poor work and so on down the chain. This attitude will result in a culture shift; team members will hesitate before considering presenting poor work. The project team will come to understand that work that is presented must be of a good standard. The culture of the project will demand it.

Demanding high quality at all times can cause problems. The project team slow down their rate of progress as they adjust to the new culture. Deliveries start to slip and a momentum begins whose objective is to lower the quality standard. Those pushing for the drop in the quality standard say that they are addressing the best interests of the project. All they will claim to care about is the pursuit of the more important goal of project delivery. You must not waver. You must make it clear that you expect high-quality work the first time that the work is undertaken. In a few cases this may mean extending timescales to raise the standard of quality. However, this should be the exception rather than the rule. If work is of a high standard then normally the overall timescale falls .

To help the staff with quality issues you can introduce some form of support mechanism. It can be complex or simple. A complex mechanism tends to be bureaucratic in nature. It will involve audits and it will also involve significant paperwork. Surprisingly these bureaucratic systems do have a place in advanced projects. They can be especially useful in safety-critical projects such as aircraft design and build. They can be just as effective as using a simple structure. Whatever you choose to do you should always remember that the key to successful quality is the culture of the project. When a project organization has a strong quality culture it will produce a quality product regardless of the supporting systems.

Commercially available standards

A system that supports the activities of the project effectively can prove invaluable. Whilst it is possible to achieve a quality result through culture alone, it is a difficult route to follow. A system or standard will almost always help in the pursuit of quality. Standards are generally put in place by an organization in a response to a drive to improve quality. There are two commonly used approaches. The first approach is to hire an external organization that is asked to deploy a proprietary quality system. The second approach is to grow organically a series of in-house standards.

Generally organizations switch between organic growth and external systems on an ongoing basis. In practice this does not matter since the two approaches end up with the same result. Often they also achieve the same time frame. This can be modelled in a simple fashion as shown in Figure 5.8.

Figure 5.8: Standards introduction

In the first approach the organization realizes that it isn't possible simply to buy in a system of standards. When it realizes this it switches to using in-house people and gains ownership of the system. Frequently organizations spend a substantial amount of funding on external consultancies in reaching this conclusion. Sadly this makes them wary of using external advice and as a result they struggle to make their own systems work.

In the second approach the organization realizes there are whole areas that it hasn't tackled. It realizes that it needs a structured framework. When it realizes this it turns to help from an outside company. In this case the organization believes that it has wasted substantial amounts of time on internal work. It wrongly blames its internal staff for failing to achieve deployment in a fast timescale.

In practice the organization is swinging between the two approaches. Neither approach on its own is sufficient. Instead the organization needs to use both approaches. A simple model illustrates this (see Figure 5.9).

Figure 5.9: Organization swinging between approaches

Practically this means that you need to apply common sense to any quality system that will be used for standards introduction and improvement. Perhaps one of the more helpful ways of ensuring you are able to cope is to understand the main external quality systems that exist. Discovering and understanding these, however, would prove to be impossible if every external system needed to be known. There are many systems that have been published. These range from extremely complex and large systems to very small and focused systems. To overcome this difficulty it's best to know a little bit about some of the most popular systems in use. The most popular systems are probably the capability maturity model (CMM), ISO9000, BS5750, IPMA and PRINCE. All of these systems are readily explained in various textbooks . Basic understanding of them can be achieved by simple research on the Internet.