Sandwich Sense (Part 1)

Craig is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and has worked with ProjectManagement.com for the last six years developing the various HEADWAY processes (Project, Change and Portfolio). He has hosted a series of webinars and is a business intelligence subject matter expert.

  Quality  

For the last seven years, I have been teaching a PMP Exam preparation workshop. In every course, the one topic that always confuses participants is the discussion on quality management. When we talk about other management topics dealing with cost, schedule, scope, risk and human resources, the puzzled look is absent. For the most part, people understand these topics. They get them because they make sense and are things that they can easily or readily relate to.

When the discussion starts to go down the quality path, it always throws people for a loop--primarily because they don’t have that same level of relationship and comfort with quality. The tone of the discussion changes and becomes very hesitant as the participants become reluctant to talk about what they do around quality. There is a fear that they will have somehow gotten it wrong, That their understanding of quality and the quality management process--once inspected by the rest of the class participants--will be full of defects and subject to rework. I don’t blame them--quality is a nebulous term that is often misunderstood and misrepresented. In this series of articles, I am going to present the three-stage quality management process of quality planning, quality assurance and quality control using a simple example of the purchasing of a submarine sandwich. 

The impetus for this example came…

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