tailieunhanh - Measuring and Managing Project Quality - If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it

Just do it! Every team member should know what they have to do and should have the right resources to get the job done They should know what the risks are and have back up plans in case of trouble. During this stage, the project manager is responsible for coordinating, though group members should communicate among themselves as required. If a group member feels he is going to go overtime/budget, it is their responsibility to bring it up to the group as soon as possible. This way, resources can temporarily be shifted to help keep the team member on schedule | Measuring and Managing Project Quality If you can t measure it you can t manage it. 2008 by Stacy Goff asapm co-founder and ProjectExperts President Introduction Teaching a Project Management workshop in the UK in the late 1980s we posed the question What is project quality One participant responded Quality is meeting or exceeding the customer s project needs. We recorded that insight on the whiteboard spelling Qualitty with two t s. Then we spoke of the need to be close to the Customers to spend time to understand their needs and so on. After a while one embarrassed participant pointed out that we had misspelled Quality. To which we responded Au Contraire we have merely exceeded the Customer s needs. This was an insightful moment for all of us. All too often project teams exceed the customer needs in areas where they feel they have control as if this can make up for those many occurrences where they have no control. Why Because it is so difficult to know all the needs and even then teams seldom know how to measure the quality of the project delivery until it is too late. What Is Quality To cite Lew Ireland s choice of definitions Quality is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. 1 Yet many people presume that Project Quality includes and indeed demands more. Part of this presumption comes from the implied needs stated above. And part comes from the subjectivity of stakeholders including team members preferences about project results. And of course part of this must come from an inability to measure Project Quality in clear terms until it is too late to correct a flawed project process or product. The Problems With Project Quality Several Quality-related problems are unique to projects. For one it is difficult to measure. In fact often key stakeholders cannot evaluate the true quality of the results until the benefit realization point and then it is too late to do anything to