The Lack of Execution Quality

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Quality  

I am sure that people will think about technology projects--in particular software development projects--as they read this article, but that doesn’t mean that other types of project are immune from these challenges. While the symptoms may differ, I could make similar arguments for the problems that I am going to describe here in at least some projects in virtually every industry and project type. I’m sure you will recognize some of these problems in your own initiatives.

When projects are initiated, there is a huge focus on the triple constraint of scope, budget and schedule. Discussions center on what has to be built, when it needs to be built by, and how much money (or how many people) is available to do the work. Quality factors into that discussion to a degree, but usually only in relation to the scope constraint.

From a software standard, we may see requirements for the number of concurrent users, the number of transactions that can be processed in any given time, the number of clicks, etc. Some of these will be generic requirements for the application as a whole, some will be very specific (security measures, for example).

However, I believe that the triple constraint also defines another element of quality, one that virtually no one on the project is consciously aware of. That element is the quality of execution, and it is a result of the …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.