In the closing words of another Gantthead article: If you want to manage client relations, manage quality first. "Otherwise Customer Relationship Management will be nothing more than Customer Problem Management, and nobody wants a life trying to appease disgruntled customers day in and day out." (Quality Is King: Deming's Point No. 3).
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With poor quality, you not only have disgruntled customers, you have dissatisfied employees, too. Professionals do not want their signature attached to a shoddy product.
So what do you do about poor quality? If you own the entire process, the basic building blocks actually begin with you. How you feel about your team and your work can't help but impact the quality of every aspect of the project.
After a personal inventory to assess your level of caring (about people and about quality), what can you do to inspire caring about quality in your team members? That is the difference between leadership and management. It can't be learned overnight, but the benefits last a lifetime and will change your life and the lives of the folks who work with you. Here are a few management resources:
What if you need help with the quality of your project right now?
You have to consider people's reactions to your whistle-blowing, (quality management is often seen in this light) and the impact to the morale of the team.
Consider the big-picture view, then identify what it will take to fix the problem--and the impact to the project schedule and budget. Carefully review all aspects before reporting to customers and management. You won't appear very professional if you discover and announce one aspect of poor quality after another.
For technical help and practical tools, turn to the PMBOK's chapter on Quality. (We are on Chapter 8 as we study to pass the exam for PMP certification.) Quality processes ensure that you delivered what was requested. Techniques in this chapter are critical to your project's success, and contribute greatly to your professional success.
While some of the processes are a little intimidating if you haven't used them before, such as Benefit/Cost Analysis, Benchmarking and Flowcharting, this chapter also acknowledges everyday life with statements like this: "Meeting customer requirements by overworking the project team may produce negative consequences in the form of increased employee attrition." (Page 96.)
And this, "Quality improvement initiatives...can improve the quality of the project's management as well as the quality of the project's product." (Page 97.)
I will say it again: The discipline of project management is very practical.
What if you do have to inspire the bosses regarding quality?
If your company or department is somewhat lacking in their commitment to quality, I recommend using as many of the PMI processes as possible. The planning tools and risk analysis speak for themselves, if you document them properly, and save you from doing a lot of preaching. It might take a failed project to make your point, but you can review your project documents and conduct a very meaningful "Lessons Learned" session before moving on to the next project with a new focus on quality.
What if you take over a low-quality project?
The wisdom of the project management texts say that you should decline to take on a project that is in a questionable state, but they must be thinking about PMs who don't have to work for a living. Once in a while, you might be assigned to a project that is all wrong.
Again, tact is very important here, especially if you ever have to work with this particular team again, or with the PM from whom you took over the project. Here's what I did on a recent project.
With less-than-perfect requirements and incomplete documentation, we had a product that I knew would not meet the customer's needs. An initial, extremely tactful session with the manager and developer let me know that we could not go back to the drawing board and build what the customer had requested. Therefore, I decided to ignore the name of the phase we were in (User Acceptance Testing) and go ahead with the schedule. In other words, to the project team we were moving into UAT, but in my mind, this was a demonstration to discover the points at which the customer would request changes. Essentially, we were still in requirement-gathering mode, in a much more iterative approach than we usually employed.
Then, instead of development, internal testing and UAT, we simply called the entire remaining development cycle "re-testing after fixes identified during UAT." The schedule went a little long, but the customer got what they requested, and nobody's feelings were hurt. (And we delivered a very nice application, with the developer motivated to please the client instead of feeling like he was backtracking for two weeks.)
What if there is no time for quality?
Our PM certification instructor told us about a testing manager who was sick and tired of having to hurry up and test at the end of a project, so he decided to test at the beginning of the project. When asked what he would be testing, he said he didn't care, but he was darned if was going to continue being rushed at the end.
If your projects are anything like mine, we fast-track our testing and, like it says on Page 96, "Meeting project schedule objectives by rushing planned quality inspections may produce negative consequences when errors go undetected." You're not kidding. Have they been peeking in on my projects?
The bottom line is: quality begets quality. The more we plan quality into the project, the more we get out, and more quality at work means less stress and better quality-of-life all around. Let's hear it for excellence!
Donna Boyette is a project manager and freelance writer focusing on small business marketing. You can reach her at [email protected].
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Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, "Certainly, I can!" Then get busy and find out how to do it. - Theodore Roosevelt |
