Lean, Agile and Kaizen in Project Quality Management
Kumar Srikant, PMP, is an educator/trainer in Bangalore.
A few decades back while accepting the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, David Kearns, the CEO of Xerox Corporation said, “Quality is a race without a finish line.”
In a desperate situation when competition was pulling down Xerox, it turned to total quality—a common-sense system that empowers workers to make decisions that typically improve productivity and reduce errors. It took a full six years of total commitment to the quality process for Xerox to be considered as one of the most competitive firms in the world. Essentially, companies and corporations in manufacturing and services have to adhere unflinchingly to the quality movement.
What is quality? Defining quality is a difficult proposition. Quality gurus have defined it in different words and in their own way:
- Edwards Deming: “Good quality means a predictable degree of uniformity and dependability with a quality standard suited to the customer.”
- Philip Crosby: “The definition of quality is conformance to requirements.”
- Joseph Juran: Quality is “Fitness for intended use,” meaning “meeting or exceeding customer expectations.”
Achieving quality in projects has indeed been a challenge. Product and service industries have used different methods and processes in project management to achieve quality. Among them, the philosophies that…
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