You are here

Differences

22 December, 2015 - 15:03

Because projects are temporary, spotting trends in samples produced by repetitive processes is not as important as considering quality in the planning of the project. Instead, the project manager must be able to provide documentation that demonstrates that the correct processes are in place to prevent quality failures.

The cost of quality (COQ) must be considered in the scope document and the project budget. If the group or company that is providing the project management is separate from the client, the project budget will bear the cost of prevention while the client will reap the rewards of avoiding the costs of failure. If senior management does not recognize the benefit to the organization of reducing cost of failure by spending more on prevention during the project, the project manager can be placed in the position of producing a product or service that he or she knows could be of higher quality.

If the cost of quality is not specifically considered and approved by senior management in the scope of the project, quality might be sacrificed during the project to meet budget goals.

Cost of Quality in an Energy Management System

At a midwestern university, a new building was being built, but it was over budget. To reduce the cost of the energy management system and avoid a late penalty, the project manager installed a cheaper energy management system. The less expensive system could not reduce power to the air circulation fans during peak electrical price periods, and it was not compatible with other campus systems. Five years after the building was built, when a central control unit was installed to coordinate building energy consumption, the incompatible system was replaced because it could not communicate with the central campus energy control system or save as much in electrical costs. The university did not take the time to specify the quality of the building control system in the scope statement and was not aware of the implication of the substitution at the time it was made. As a result, the cost of quality was lower in the prevention category but much higher in the cost of failure category. Because the parties acted in their own interests instead of the interest of the total university and quality was not a team effort, waste occurred and total cost increased.

Some separation of responsibility for quality is necessary. For example, if a project is undertaken to build a facility that makes something, it is important to distinguish between the quality of the work done by the project team and the quality of the items produced after the project is over. The client provides specifications for the facility that should result in production of quality products. It is the client’s responsibility to provide appropriate project requirements that will result in a facility that can produce quality products. It is the project manager’s responsibility to meet the project requirements. The project manager must focus on meeting requirements for project activities, but as part of the quality team, opportunities to improve the quality of the final product should be discussed with the client. If the final products fail to meet quality standards, someone will be blamed for the failure. It could be the project manager, even if he or she met all the requirements of the project specified by the client.

Cost of Prevention in Safety Training

An electronic parts manufacturer chooses to expand operations and needs to hire and train fifty employees. It uses its own human resources department to handle the selection and hiring of the employees, but it contracts with a nearby technical college to provide some of the training. The technical college is responsible for designing and delivering training on the topic of plant safety practices. The objective of the training project is to reduce the number of workplace accidents, but that is not the characteristic by which the quality of the training program is determined because the rate of accidents for employees who go through the training will not be known until after they have been employed for months or years. The criteria for determining the quality of the training must be something that can be controlled and measured by the project manager during the project.

Because projects are time sensitive, meeting activity finish dates is a common characteristic of quality work on a project that is not typical of a requirement of a process manager.

Timely Delivery Part of Quality

At a remote mining site in South America, the gasoline and diesel fuel must be brought in by truck over poorly maintained roads to run the trucks and heavy equipment used to set up an ore processing facility. The vendor for supplying fuel is required to provide fuel in the right grades for the various vehicles, in the appropriate quantities, and in a timely manner. If fuel of the right type and grade, with acceptable levels of impurities, is delivered a week after the vehicles have run out of fuel, the work on the fuel-delivery activity is of low quality.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Both project and process quality management require commitment from all employees, including top management. They are both client oriented and prevention oriented.
  • Projects are temporary and allow fewer opportunities to improve repetitive processes. Cost of prevention is often part of the project budget, but the cost of failure usually happens after the project is completed. This separation of costs and benefits can lead to taking short-term savings on the project at the expense of higher cost of failure after the project is complete.

EXERCISES

  1. How is quality control of a project different from quality control of a manufacturing process?

Cost of Failure after the Project

Consider a project you have been involved in, in which the cost of prevention would be part of the project budget but the cost of failure would be incurred after the project was completed. Describe why you think top management would have to be involved to make the best decision for the company.