Project management: a quality management approach
Excellent publications have been available on project management for many years and much discussion has taken place extolling the virtues of this aspect of management and its great influence on the overall successful operation of organizations in all sectors. When being considered in its generic form, project management can also be applied to any set of activities, and in this context it is no less than a universal management tool. This paper examines the feasibility and practicality of applying a quality management approach to project management. The model used for the analysis is the criteria of the Canada Awards for Excellence, the internationally recognized quality award program.
Quality as a source of empowerment
Among the three important managerial indicators, quality, cost and productivity, the human history of quality is far more long‐standing and quality is the only item of common concern to both manufacturer and customer: quality is a more “human” concept than either cost or productivity. Senior managers’ appeals to improve quality are more easily accepted and difficult to refuse than calls to cut cost or improve productivity. Quality is a powerful source of employees’ empowerment. A company’s basic business philosophy is of fundamental importance to make itself attractive to its employees and customers, as well as its shareholders, and to continue to develop healthily instead of merely pursuing profit. Because of the nature of this quality, it is extremely important to talk to everyone in the company about their basic philosophy regarding quality and the quality management activities to ensure that quality. Strong sense of responsibility of employees is indispensable to achieve the work aims, and the following two conditions must be fulfilled: the aims of the work must be clearly stated; and the people must be given as great a degree of freedom as possible in the means and methods by which they can achieve the aims. Also outlines the steps leading to creativity.
Reading research critically: assessing the validity and reliability of research instrumentation--Part 2.
Accurate measurement of research variables is necessary so that research consumers can trust that it is the research intervention that affected the change in the outcome variable, not some extraneous error component. Reliability is the accuracy with which the research instruments measure the variable that they are designed to measure. A number of known threats to instrument reliability should be anticipated by the researcher and looked for the consumer. These threats are presented in this article.