Project Management

BSB20315-7

Lecture 9
Stakeholders and Quality
 Learning Outcomes

• The concept of quality and quality

management
• Quality performance and conformance
• Towards quality improvement

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 Stakeholders and Quality
- An Introduction
• Introducing a process for identification and
management of stakeholders
• Key to stakeholder satisfaction is quality
• There are several definitions of quality
– Quality of the tangible product
– Quality of the intangible service
– Quality as a customer expectation
– Quality as a customer perception
• Key techniques
– Quality planning
– The management of conformance and performance
– Managing the expectations and perceptions of
stakeholders
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 The concept of quality and quality
management
• Traditional approaches to quality focus entirely on
product
– But many stakeholders will receive an intangible service
• So what is quality and does it matter?
• Definitions of quality should focus
– Internally: the prerogative of the project team
– Externally: the domain of the marketing or other
business people, dependent of communications
– A combination: ‘the bridge’ (see over) – leads to
success
– Caveat: there will always be an element of quality that
remains elusive
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 The concept of quality and quality
management (Continued)

Figure 9.1 Bridge model of project quality management

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 The concept of quality and quality
management (Continued)
• The product based view (an internal view)
– Definable and measurable set of characteristics
– Fit for purpose
– Conforming to specification
– Defect free
• Customer expectations and perceptions (external
view)
– The level of quality expected compared to the level
perceived to have been received
– Synthesis of objective and subjective elements of
product and service
– A judgement of value
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 The concept of quality and quality
management (Continued)

Table 9.1 Perspectives on quality management

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Quality and stakeholder satisfaction
(The concept of quality and quality management)(Continued)

• A general principle of stakeholder management:

the need to appreciate customer behaviour
• The nature of satisfaction
– Satisfaction equals
• the perception (of what has been received) less
• the expectation (of what was to be received)
[Maister’s first law]
– Greatest cause of dissatisfaction is the creation of
unrealistic expectations

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Quality and stakeholder satisfaction
(The concept of quality and quality management)(Continued)

– Unpacking the gap(s) between perception and

expectation
• Customer requirements and management’s
perceptions of these requirements
• This perception of requirements and the written
specification
• This specification and the product/process delivered
• The product/service and what communications have
led the customer to expect

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Quality and stakeholder satisfaction
(The concept of quality and quality management)(Continued)

(or QFD)

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Quality and stakeholder satisfaction
(The concept of quality and quality management)(Continued)

Quality function deployment

– A tool that attempts to minimise gaps between
expectations of a stakeholder and the project
delivery (process and outcome)
– First – the customer expresses requirements in
the customer’s own language
– This language is then correlated with that of the
project teams

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Quality and stakeholder satisfaction
(The concept of quality and quality management)(Continued)

– ‘The what’ (requirement) can then be related to ‘the

how’ (project delivery)
– Customers then asked to prioritise ‘the whats’; this
indicates how perceptions can be managed
– Customer perceptions of competitor performance is
added
– A further correlation between ‘the hows’
(complimentary or conflicting) and ‘the whats’
indicates a framework for making trade-offs

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 Quality performance and
conformance
• The quality planning process
– Project quality should be defined from both
customer and organisational view points

Figure 9.2 Quality planning process

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 Quality performance and
conformance (Continued)
• Quality may be conformance to specification and
measurable (manufacturing)
• Quality may be determined by customer orientation,
expectations and perceptions (service)

Table 9.2 Manufacturing and service approaches to quality

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 Quality conformance planning
(Quality performance and conformance)(Continued)

Quality conformance planning (quality assurance)

• The project manual
• A means of ‘planning for achieving’ and a demonstration
of the plan
Introduction – reasoning behind project
Planning – objectives, scope, WBS, schedule, budget,
contingencies and risk analysis
Execution details – schedules, responsibilities,
procedures, forms, organisational structure
Records – minutes of meetings, notes on problems and
how they were dealt with, changes, status
reports, other correspondence
Misc information – contact details, technical reference
materials etc.
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 Quality conformance planning
(Quality performance and conformance)(Continued)

• Responsibility allocation
– Resource availability to carry out the tasks is key
– Plans to be credible must consider limitations of
availability of people and equipment

Figure 9.3 Responsibility matrix

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 Quality performance planning
(Quality performance and conformance)(Continued)

Quality performance planning

– The nature of satisfaction
• Customer cues and managing consumer expectations
– How to manage the process by which the service provided by the
project is delivered
• Tangibles, often the core product, readily assessed
• Intangibles (often the process)
– Responsiveness
– Communication
– Competence/professionalism
– Courtesy
– Accessibility
• Judgements often made on the peripheral (or support) elements
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 Quality performance planning
(Quality performance and conformance)(Continued)

Table 9.3 Management of expectations and perceptions

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 Communications planning
(Quality performance and conformance)(Continued)

• Communications planning
– Keeping stakeholders in the loop is a vital part of quality
planning
– A table identifying the ‘grand communications’ is a common
technique
– Beware e-mail overload

Table 9.4 Communication plan

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 Towards quality improvement

• Quality costs
– Quality management involves the cost of quality
– Quality is not free
– Costing quality is not simple
– Elements of prevention, appraisal and failure
– Elements are often subjective and will vary project
to project
– The objective is not to simply measure costs or
create more work
– The objective is to allow a process of investigation
facilitating a reduction of quality costs

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Towards quality improvement (Continued)

Table 9.5 Quality cost categories

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 Management of failure
(Towards quality improvement)(Continued)

• Management of failure (recovery)

– Required where a stakeholder (particularly the
customer) becomes dissatisfied
– Rescue the current situation
• Learn from it
• Prevent ‘consumer terrorism’
– Management process
• Identify what has gone wrong
• Contain the situation – accept, prevent further damage or
escalation
• Put in place recovery actions – regain customer
confidence
• Ensure practices change
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 Management of failure
(Towards quality improvement)(Continued)

• Variability
– Service projects exhibit greater variability
• Involvement of customer in delivery
• Reliance on staff for quality
– Not a problem if high margin customised service
– Is a problem if high volume throughput and
standardised service required
• Staff may introduce variability
• Not appropriate for customers
– In general, the lower levels of the WBS should
show lower variability
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 Summary

• Diversity of definitions of quality

– for product and service
– for core and peripheral outputs
• Strategic and customer inputs are necessary to
manage quality
– These translate into quality assurance, quality
conformance, customer satisfaction
– Quality conformance requires a documented system
– the project manual

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 Summary (Continued)

– Customers have
• expectations (before the experience)
• perceptions (post experience)
• gaps between will lead to delight (when the former is
lower) or dissatisfaction (when the latter is lower)
• Quality costs
– Investment in improving quality and prevention of
failures will reduce costs.

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