Managing quality in project management

At today's level of development, the concept of "quality" is seen as a complex component, including the quality of the final product, the quality of management, the quality of supply or work, the quality of life of people (employees) and society as a whole.

What is quality management

Quality management is a coordinated and interconnected management activity designed to ensure that the organization operates smoothly and smoothly.

The management of the organization, in terms of quality, means that all activities are subject to established goals for quality, and to achieve these goals, the organization has developed a system of plans, has the necessary resources, and actions to achieve the goals are carried out.

The quality management includes four main components:

• quality control
• Ensuring quality
• Quality planning
• improving quality.
• quality control

A quality control is an activity to assess compliance with a compliance facility with established requirements. Assessment activities may include measurements, tests, observations, monitoring, verification, calibration, etc. activities that result in comparing the values of observed characteristics with those set.

Ensuring quality

Ensuring quality is a systematic (regular) activity through which you can meet the requirements. It includes manufacturing, management, logistics, maintenance and so on.

Planning quality

Quality planning is an action to identify the necessary characteristics of an object and set their target values. The quality management calls such actions a set of quality goals. Also, quality planning includes identifying the processes and resources needed to achieve goals.

Improving quality

Improving quality is to implement actions that can improve the organization's ability to meet the requirements for an object. Under the term "object" quality management considers products, processes, management system and organization as a whole.

As such, quality management is a rather large and voluminous section of applied science, which contains both the philosophy of quality management, theory, and practical methods.

History of quality management development

Interest in quality management arose with the formation of mass industrial production. From the end of the 19th century until today, quality management has gone through several stages, which are connected with the development of certain production technologies. 

These steps do not have clearly defined boundaries. It would be more correct to talk about overlapping stages, because the development and formation of certain methods of management and production technologies does not begin and does not end in one moment.

In the first stage, quality management paid the most attention to controlling the parameters and characteristics of products. This stage falls at the end of the 19th, early 20th century. 

It is characterized by close attention to the product and the identification of problems in the product. During this period, the plants have developed and large quality control services, which are engaged in the verification of each product. Monitoring is usually carried out at the end of the production cycle and requires the involvement of specially trained inspectors.

The second stage dates back to about the period of the 20s, 50s of the 20th century. This step is called the "process control phase" or process management. The quality management shifts the focus from the product to the production processes. 

This transition has been made possible by the development of statistical methods for monitoring processes and control cards. As a result, it was possible to significantly reduce the cost of control and improve the quality of products.

The third stage of its development of quality management took place in the period from the 50s to the early 80s. 

Much of the transition is related to the efforts made by Japanese companies to increase competition for their products. This step can be called a "quality improvement stage" or "quality assurance." During this period, quality management focuses on improving the company's subsystems in the complex - production processes, management processes, maintenance processes, personnel management, procurement, sales, product sales, etc.

The fourth phase began to take shape around the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is associated with focusing on the most important characteristics of the product for the consumer. During this period, competition between producers increases significantly. The quality management has come to focus on quality planning, so this phase can be called a "quality planning phase."

Key people in quality management

The quality management is closely related to the names of many scientists and engineers who have made a great contribution to solving quality problems. The work of a number of them was the "catalysts" of the transition of quality management to the next phase of its development.

Walter A. Shewhart) was involved in the development of statistical methods for process management. His name is associated with the use of control cards in the workplace (Shuhart's control cards). Schuhart's work also served as the basis for creating a quality improvement cycle known as the PDCA (Plan - Do - Check - Act) cycle.

Joseph Juran is known for developing the "triad of quality". The quality triad includes a cycle of work on quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. Also, Juran is a developer of the concept of CW'M (Company - Wide quality management) - corporate quality management.

W. Edwards Deming is considered to be the founder and developer of the Concept of Total quality management. He has made a major contribution to the development of statistical process management techniques. He is also known for developing a systemic approach to quality improvement, which he was able to present in a simple and understandable way - in the form of a cycle of improvements PDCA (Schuhart-Deming cycle).

Armand Feigenbum has developed the principles of universal quality control. He was the founder and chairman of the international quality academy.

Kaoru Ishikawa is a developer of many quality tools. The most famous of these is the causal chart or is Ishikawa's diagram. Kaori Ishikawa developed the basic principles of the corporate quality control system and suggested using a "circle of quality" to describe the product's "circle of quality".

Genichi Taguchi was involved in the development of statistical methods and their use in industrial production (the so-called "Taguchi methods"). Now these methods are the basis of the concept of 6-sigma. Taguchi is also a developer of industrial experiment planning techniques. He proposed the concept of improving quality while reducing costs. 

Shigeo Shingo is one of the developers of Japan's well-known Just-in-Time planning and production system. He is also known for creating the SMED (single minute exchange of die) and the Poka-Yoke (mistake proof proof) system, which is now part of the lean production system.

Applied quality management

At the modern stage of development, quality management has a large theoretical base, which incorporates elements of many sciences. However, from the moment it is now, quality management remains an applied science.

 Its main task is to plan, create and provide a quality result (products, management system, processes, infrastructure, habitat, etc.). This is done by creating application systems that are implemented and operated by different companies.

The most well-known and popular systems that quality management includes to date are:

1. ISO 9000 is a quality management system built on the basis of international ISO 9000 standards. It is one of the most popular and formalized systems. It focuses on strict regulation, clear employee interaction, and continuous improvement of both individual subsystems and the organization as a whole.
2. It is both a system and a management philosophy at the same time. The most popular and common in Japan is in Japan, where it was developed. At the heart of the concept of Deming, Juran, Crosby, etc., the main principle that builds a management system is the principle of improving everything that can be improved in the company. There are no strictly formalized requirements (such as is 9000) for which the system should be built.
3. Premiums in quality - they can be considered as another version of the quality system. There are quality awards in different countries, such as the Deming Award, the Baldridge Prize, the EF'M (European Foundation for quality management). Only the best organizations that meet the criteria of the award are awarded. The set of these criteria is broad enough and, in order to meet these criteria, the organization must apply different methods of quality management.
4. 6 Sigma is a method for improving the quality of the organization's processes. It focuses on identifying and addressing the causes of various inconsistencies and defects. The 6 Sigma technique is a set of quality tools and strategies. It was originally developed and used by Motorola and gained prominence in the late 1980s. At the heart of the 6 sigma technique is Taguchi's work.
5. Lean Manufacturing or Lean Production is a set of production practices that reduce costs and improve the quality of the final product. The concept of lean production is based on the principle that the expenditure of any resources of the organization should be aimed only at creating value for the end consumer. Accordingly, any consumption of resources that does not increase value should be reduced. This uses a set of different methods, techniques and quality management tools. The concept of lean manufacturing gained notoriety and dissemination after the publication of information about Toyota's production system in the early 1990s. This concept is based on the work of Shigeo Shingo.
6. Kaizen is a philosophy and a set of practices designed to continuously improve the organization's processes. It is a Japanese term for the future. Kaizen has been a systemic approach to improvement since the early 1950s and is one of the basic approaches in the T'M system. The essence of this approach is to make small and minor improvements, but to perform them constantly (daily). As a result, after a while, a large number of minor improvements will lead to major improvements. In this respect, Kaizen expresses the well-known law of dialectic of the transition of quantity into quality.
7. Best Practice is a set of techniques and techniques that provide a quality result. The qualitative result refers to the results of the best companies in the industry. The spread of best practices began in the early 1990s. As a rule, they are formed in the form of collections or standards. These standards collect requirements for the use of certain methods, including quality management methods.

This is not the whole list of methods and systems that are developed and applied in quality management. New concepts and methods for quality management are being developed. And the very concept of "quality" is becoming more and more multifaceted.