Quality Isn't Free. But It Just Might Be a Worthwhile Investment.
Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.
One of the classic books of the total quality movement (before it got rebranded as Six Sigma and everybody wanted a black belt) was Quality is Free by Philip Crosby. I had a problem with the title when I first heard it (and I still have a problem with it now).
Quality isn't free. Quality takes time, effort and hard work to realize. Project management, by the same token, also isn't free; there is a very real cost to managing a project using project management techniques. Estimates of the cost of project management range from 3% (for very simple projects) to as much as 20% of overall project costs. Like with the idea of quality, the presumption is that the project would be that much more expensive if we didn't pay attention to managing it well in the first place.
This was, in fact, Crosby's point in coining the title. It isn't that quality is free, so much as the absence of quality is expensive. It costs significantly more to repair, fix, replace or rework than if we just got things right in the first place. In this, he is absolutely right, and the problem is one that a lot of project managers will (or should) recognize. Doing work over again on a project is exponentially more expensive and time consuming, and should be unnecessary. Getting it right the first time is a far more cost-effective strategy.
So what does that mean for project managers…
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