Preface

A need has existed throughout history for both project management and quality management. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, the level of professional attention to the two fields increased dramatically because of increasing competition and complexity. Both fields grew rapidly, but largely without explicit awareness and use of their joint resources. Two exceptions are: (1) a few quality practitioners and academics recognized that project management techniques could be used to plan and manage quality improvement projects, and (2) the Project Management Institute (PMI©), a professional group for project managers, recognized that quality is one of the essential knowledge areas for project managers.

This book explicitly links the two fields and reinforces their convergence. We believe that the quality context (organizational and environmental), processes, and tools are essential to project management success. In turn, project stages and activities are essential to implementing quality management success. It is equally important to manage quality processes within the project stages and to manage the project’s impact on its external context. A successful project manager uses the activities and tools to increase quality within the project stages and helps shape the external organizational and environmental context so that it remains supportive of project success.

As a result of their temporary nature, managing projects is intrinsically different from managing ongoing operations. However, many quality concepts and techniques have been developed primarily for use in ongoing operations. In this book, we adapt many quality tools and concepts to meet the unique challenges of projects. The purpose of this book is to present a roadmap and tools for managing project quality.

This book is targeted at four primary audiences: practicing project professionals, practicing quality professionals, academic and consulting practitioners, and students interested in managing quality projects. The first intended audience for this book is practicing project professionals. We specifically address many of our suggestions to project managers, project sponsors, project core team members, project suppliers, and project customers. Each has several important roles to play in delivering quality projects.

The second intended audience for this book is practicing quality professionals. Many quality practitioners already know how to use classic approaches to manage quality in an ongoing operation. Since most of these people will also be involved in some project work, this book can be useful to help them adapt standard quality practices for use on projects.

The third intended audience for this book is academic and consulting professionals. Researchers, educators, trainers, project consultants, and organizational change agents can benefit from increased sophistication in managing project quality.

The fourth intended audience for this book is students interested in managing quality projects. Students or associates in a formal training program can benefit from the structured integration of project and quality management provided by this book.

For all of these audiences, this book is valuable at each of four levels of learning, as described in the Kirkpatrick model. For those at the first learning level of unconscious incompetence (i.e., you don’t know that you don’t know), this book provides a structured introduction to best practices to create basic awareness of the value of both fields. For those at the second learning level of conscious incompetence (i.e., you realize that you do not know), this book offers specific assessments, activities, and tools to instill deeper awareness and provide preliminary skills. We think many professionals who know either quality or project management, but not both, may be at this level.

For those at the third learning level of conscious competence (i.e., you know and do, but only with conscious effort), this book provides assessments, activities, roadmaps, and tools to increase skill competence by integrating the two fields in a newly developed five-stage model. Finally, for those at the fourth learning level of unconscious competence (i.e., effortless mastery), this book can help you make the transition from being an expert performer to being a skilled mentor who can explicitly share his or her competency with others to build a learning organization.

We hope that this book will help experts sustain learning organizations, deepen professional association learning, and expand domestic and global social learning about managing project quality.

In Chapter 1 of this book, we first briefly review both the project management and quality management fields. We next develop a detailed understanding of the four pillars of project quality management: customer satisfaction, process improvement, fact-based management, and empowered performance. Finally, we delineate the need for improvement in managing project quality.

The next five chapters of the book each represents one stage in the newly developed five-stage project quality management model: project quality initiation, project quality planning, project quality assurance, project quality control, and project quality closure. Each stage has a defined starting and ending point, with a sequence of activities and appropriate tools that would normally be used to manage project quality successfully.

The activities we describe are at a level of detail for a “middle of the road” project. A project that is simple, short, and familiar could streamline the manner in which the activities are completed, but would still need to accomplish the spirit of them. A large, complex, or unfamiliar project would need to perform the activities we describe, but in more detail. We feel this “middle of the road” approach will give project participants a good starting point from which to scale up or down.

Features included in this book to assist the reader include:

An overall project flowchart to illustrate the five-stage project quality management model

A detailed flowchart that shows the flow of activities within each stage

A table at the start of each chapter that shows the four project quality pillars, activities, and tools

Italicized concepts in text to visually highlight key ideas

Chapter section numbers that correspond with the activities listed in each table

Figures to help the reader visualize appropriate concepts and tools

An integrated project quality activity matrix to summarize and highlight the core activities that require extra attention.

Timothy J. Kloppenborg

Joseph A. Petrick