TABLE OF CONTENTS What is quality? Customers know it when they see it. Suppliers promise that their goods and services embody it. Both views are often missing a clear, up-front definition of what quality is, and this leads to confusion and frustration when trying to determine just how to deliver it.
Project managers probably feel this most acutely. A customer may demand quality and an organization may promise to deliver quality, but a project manager is the one who has to do it. Failure can have devastating immediate and long-term consequences for both the project manager and the project organization.
Given its importance to project outcomes, quality ought to be a problem long ago solved. It is not. Projects continue to be plagued by imprecise quality goals and arcane quality methods most suited for a shop floor, all of this condemning the project to less-than-satisfactory results or worse.
There is a better way. From a product manufacturing or service delivery point of view, quality is, to a great degree, a problem solved. Quality tools and techniques have been developed and refined over the past 100 years to the level that they are now a matter of science, not art. Applying these proven ways to project management should be a simple matter of transference, but that is the problem. Projects come in many stripes and colors.
