Most people will say that quality is important, but it might not always be the most important thing. We can see this play out, particularly, when projects are running behind or are over budget. Quality control efforts are often one of the first things to go by the wayside because they take up resources (e.g., people, time, and funds). But with your training and experience, you already see this coming. How do you address these quality-related issues with your team and with your senior leadership?

When you start working on a project, there always needs to be a timeline for the project to be created such that it ensures the maximum efficiency of the Project. The timeline could be from few hours to even few years, depending upon the criticality of the Project. However, timeline helps in estimating the resources and time required to achieve the same and thereby, creating a discipline to ensure the completion of the project in that time. All projects need to be completed within the given time otherwise the essence of it is lost. But in the case, where the Projects are prone to uncertainties, then certain strategies could be worked out or pre-decided in order to be still determined to achieve the same. However, compromising with the quality of the project can cost the Project team as well as to the user of the Project, dearly. Either claiming lives of the people or simply making the entire project unsuitable for utility, the quality defects could have an adverse impact upon both, the reputation of the Project team and the Company as well as upon its customers or users. Hence, the first thing that needs to be addressed here with regards to the quality-related issues, is how to maintain the timeline of the Project or given the exigencies, how to push the same so that the quality is not compromised upon.
Therefore, if I were a Project manager who realizes that the project may not be able to be completed in that time that I would go for re-planning the work which is certainly required in order to ensure the feasibility of completing the project even within the time that was earlier determined. If in re-planning, it is found out that employing of additional resources could ensure the completion of the Project on time, then the same could be undertaken using various techniques. However, if there are certain activities in the process that cannot be crashed down and are critical in nature, then possibilities of delay may be inevitable. Hence as a Project manager, I would prefer a re-plan to evaluate the Project once again.
Accordingly, I may recommend a Critical Path Method. Critical Path Method technique is especially undertaken to analyze the complex issues pertaining to the Time management, by differentiating the Critical activities from that of the non-critical ones in order to in order to ensure the smooth implementation of processes. The Critical Path Method helps in determining the float i.e. the slack time in the field of the Critical path with any slip in it causing an overall delay in the whole process. I would analyze the condition on the basis of the floats in the critical path. If an activity has few floats in the Project process, on a Critical path method instead of desired zero float, then that would mean that there would be many slacks in the process that could result into delay if all such floats are on the Critical Path Method and hence in such a case, the completion schedule could not be met.. But if these floats do not fall on the Critical path but on the non-critical paths instead, then the total float on the non-critical path needs to be calculated in order to ascertain critical path drag of an activity i.e. the total amount of time that is added in the overall activity. Then, all these floats need to be added to the critical path method to ascertain the Project’s duration.
Apart from this, I could also re-plan and work upon the following:
Seek help from a Project Management Software which is a tool (Microsoft Project, Primavera, etc.) that can track planned vs. actual dates, report variances from the schedule baseline and forecast the effect of changes on the schedule model.
Conduct the resource optimization techniques to adjust the schedule due to demand (project time) and supply of resources (resource availability).
And the most importantly, implement the automated scheduling tools that contain the schedule model by allowing one to input the scheduling data and to monitor the schedule via the output (the project schedule).
Next, we need to also ensure that certain Quality techniques are in place that ensures a mandatory continuous monitoring of the quality within the Project. For eg., Total Quality Management. Total Quality Management is a philosophy that involves everyone in the organization in a continual effort to improve quality and achieve customer satisfaction. Hence with Total Quality Management in place, the Organization works together to guarantee Quality services to all its stakeholders. For this, it may use various tools such as Six Sigma which is a statistical program undertaken by the Organization for the process improvement. It has six standards that is set to reduce defects to 3.4 per million, thereby helping in identifying and mitigating any variances in the system. It is a customer-centric approach to cater the requirements of the end-users.
Lean-Six Sigma could be useful in any industry that experiences significant non-value added time in their processes and it is large enough to support the resources required to fully implement it. For smaller entities using some of the processes of Lean-Six Sigma might be useful but the allocation of resources would need to be monitored to prevent the project from detracting from production. Be it in small or in large entities, dealing with non-value added time in processes or the optimization of resource allocation have now become feasible due to the versatility of the Lean Six sigma. Especially, in the manufacturing and service processes, with reduction in inventory maintained and with considerable decrease in the order-to-delivery time by the Companies, by far, the concept of Lean has been successfully undertaken by many Organizations in order to be efficient in serving the customers in a highly competitive market. For example, Toyota had developed the concept of Lean Manufacturing way back about seven decades ago and it was because of the efforts taken by Toyota that the US automobile manufacturers also started adapting to Lean in more committed way.
Customer satisfaction could also be improved by practicing Kaizen which is a Japanese term for a management philosophy the stresses the need for continuous improvement. Better operations can come from many, small, continuous improvements. But the focus should be on what adds value to the product and thereby try to eliminate steps that do not add value (such as inspection for defects). Elimination of waste in the business processes could also be the result of Kaizen. It therefore helps in generating such small improvements as well that could be the result of the efforts put in by all the employees within an Organization. Under this program, the technical staff is brought together with the Managers in order to identify what improvements could be made in the current processes. However, it should be within the scope of the both the, managers as well as the technical experts or the process owners.
 
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