Project Execution Quality And Control For Legalities

Project quality management plan

Discuss about the Project Execution Quality and Control for Legalities.

This report explores the concepts of quality management and control in projects. It is divided into three sections. The first section explores the project of quality management planning and explains how the project quality management processes help attain and maintain the quality standards on project as well as establish control over global projects. In the next section, issues of culture, training and legalities are explored with respect to global projects. Lastly, the report assessment the values and inputs of project management practice with respect to their potential for managing legal and cultural differences on global projects. The objective is to understand the role quality management plays in management of environment including culture, training, and legalities.

Project quality management can be broken down into four process groups that include quality definition, quality planning, quality assurance and quality control.

Quality Definition: The first step in the quality management is definition of the quality which involves identification of quality standards. These standards help in identification of the characteristics that would govern a project and would generate the outcomes that would be acceptable to the stakeholders (Salgé, 2000). Quality characteristics include measures, attributes and methods associated with product or service that is the outcome of the project in concern. Some of the characteristics that can be used for defining quality of a project and its outcomes include functionality, performance, reliability, relevance, timeliness, suitability, completeness and consistency. These characteristics are not just limited to the project outcomes like the product or a service but also the processes that the project teams use to deliver the project (Goff, 2008).

There are many quality standards that have been defined in the project context. International project oriented organizations commonly use ISO standards for identifying quality standards. ISO has developed more than 13,000 international standards such as ISO 9000:2000 which is a process-based quality standard and ISO 10006:2003 which provides a structured approach for optimization of quality processes (Ahmed, 2009).

Quality standards can be of different types such as product standards, project standards, project management standards, and others such as procurement standard or safety standards. Product standards define quality specifications for product or service functionality, design, cost, reliability, availability, maintainability, and adaptability (Goff, 2008). Project standards provide standard procedure for project management processes and can vary with the differences in the phases of the projects. For instance, construction projects have phases like concept definition, designing, supply, construction and project commissioning while software would have different phases such as requirement definition, specification, prototyping, designing, system development, testing, installation and pilot testing. Thus, different project standards can be defined for different industries (Cleland & Gareis, 2006).

Cultural awareness, Training and Legal issues

Quality Planning: Once quality is appropriately defined, quality management plan can be developed to ensure that the actors on the project are working as per the requirements of the quality on the project. Thus, quality definition ensures that quality standards are appropriately defined and quality management plan helps in ensuring that these standards are appropriately followed (Morris & Pinto, 2004).

Quality Assurance: It is the process that confirms that the quality management activities used on the project would ensure that the quality outputs of the project would meet the needs and requirements of the project stakeholders. This gives confidence to the stakeholder on the ability of the project to reach desired quality standards. Quality assurance is used at the time of the implementation of the project and it involves continuous evaluation of the project performance to check if it is following the quality standards (E&C, 2015). Quality assurance processes are used for products, services, processes and procedures used for managing project scope, budget, schedule, and quality using appropriate tools, techniques and methodologies. Quality assurance also ensures that the project meets the regulatory requirements of the project. PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, and Act) cycle is a tool that can be used for monitoring quality assurance (Giese, 2005). It involves four steps that include establishment of objectives, implementation of processes, evaluation of implemented processes with respect to objectives, and application of improvement actions in case the results need to be changed. PDCA ensures that every component of a project follows quality standards and involves continuous evaluation of project performance during implementation. If the performance of a project is not found satisfactory then improvement actions are taken. Tools like benchmarking can be used to bring these improvements (Atkinson, 1999). Benchmarking involves understanding of processes, their analysis, comparison of the performance with others in the industry, and implementation of actions that can reduce the performance gap. During 1970s, when Xerox faced tough competition from Japanese organizations in United States, benchmarking was used by the company to identify the causes of performance differences in Xerox and Japanese companies (Huemann, 2004).

Quality Control: It involves monitoring of the outcomes of a project to identify if they are following certain quality standards defined for the project. The results of the project, the quality management plan, operational definitions and checklists make the input to the control process. Quality control utilizes some tools to establish controls over projects such as quality inspection, control charts, flowcharts, trend analysis, pareto diagram and statistical sampling. The outcome of the control process comes with improvement in quality and process adjustments (FAO, 2014). Quality control charts were first introduced for quality control by Walter Shewhart for managing quality of mass production in the defence industry of UK and USA during World War 2. Since then, organizations globally use them for visualizing variations in outputs using graphs (Hauptfleisch, Campbell, & Kajimo-Shakantu, 2014). Six-Sigma was defined later that measures the output variation using standard deviations such that any output going beyond +/- six standard deviations from the standard is considered as defective and corrective actions are demanded (Fung, 2015).

Quality management system plays a significant role in changing the culture of an organization for supporting the changes required to be made for the project to succeed (Salgé, 2000). In global organizations, people working on international projects come from different cultures and thus, in order to achieve the full potential on a project, an organizational culture needs to be created that uses the diversity caused by these differences as a competitive advantage. This can help in overcoming and resolving issues that can arise on an international project due to the cultural differences between people (Winograd, Mallett, Bunton, & Hayashida, 2007).

There can be several cultural issues that are faced on the international projects. One of the causes of majority of challenges on global projects is the language barrier that causes differences in communications between people in the teams (UAS, 2012). Things can go wrong id the communication is not clear. If a common language is agreed upon then things can become simpler. However, this needs a careful selection of the project team as all the team members should be comfortable using the single agreed upon language on the project (Huemann, 2004).

Issues can also arise due to personality differences between the people working on a single project that could have been shaped by the individual culture of the organization or the country they belong to. For instance, person may come from an aggressive culture and thus, takes aggressive approaches and like to try new ideas to get the work done while other people may come from more stereotyped cultures where they believe in using only the tried and tested methods. These differences in approaches of the people can cause conflicts on the project. Stereotyping of people against cultural differences can also cause conflicts and distrust among people working on projects (McGregor, 2004).

The differences can also be in work ethics. For instance, one culture can have speed on the focus and look for fast responses such as USA while other cultures like Japan may have more focus on the correctness of the process and thus, they would take time to produce things.  These discrepancies need to identified and worked upon as they can cause problem in communications and working conditions (Rodrigues & Sbragia, 2013).

Besides the culture, there are also differences in the ways legal and regulatory systems operate in different countries and this can impact the work culture and performance of an international project greatly. For instance, US employment policies are made on the basis of the “at will” attitude but policies made by European Union take the socialist approach and thus, have additional measures of protection for the employees. A manager while working on a project that involves teams from different countries including USA and EU countries has to know these differences and operate accordingly such that the project does not fall victim to the legal hassles (Lock & Scott, 2017).

Differences can lie in regulatory and legal environments that can cause cross-border issues and to avoid them certain aspects of law and regulation have to be studied such as contract laws, intellectual property regulations, and labour laws (Lovric-Pernak, 2017).

When working with international teams, the companies also have to take care of the training needs of the project team members not just on the technical aspects but also on the legal and cultural aspects to avoid these challenges from occurring. Cross cultural training thus, play a critical role in shaping the culture and structure of the organization. Moreover, in order to maintain the quality standards, the teams have to be trained on different standards of quality that may be used in different countries. However, this can be challenging in an international environment because of certain reasons like:

• Global projects usually involve a large number of people whose level of understanding and learning styles are different which can make it difficult to provide training as their learning process would have to be dealt in different ways.
• Because of the incapacities of the standard methods on fulfilment of the training needs of people from different cultures and countries, the training process can be very time consuming as well as expensive for an organization.
• Global project teams have to work on huge projects that have many critical aspects and complexities that need to handled for which the managers and project team members have to remain proactive and thus, they may not have sufficient time to get sufficient training on cultural and legal aspects. Many companies thus employ people from local areas in order to avoid giving cultural training which can cause difficulties at later stages of project execution.

As already identified, there can be a number of cultural differences in the project teams that work in a global environment. Thus, while building virtual teams for international projects, managers need to take care of the cultural diversities of the teams and take differential approaches to managing people from different cultures. Thus, the procedures and policies for the human resource management have to be developed to suit the multicultural environment on the project (Vinaja, 2001).

The legal and regulatory differences can cause issues in many areas such as administrative frameworks, quality standards, agreements, legal clauses in contracts, dispute handling, tax structures, exchange rate controls, and inflation. The legal and political climate of every country that is part of the project thus, has to be studied.

Conclusions

This report explored the concepts of quality control and quality management on international projects. It was found that quality management has four process groups that include quality definition, quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control. Each of these processes help in establishing and maintaining quality standards on a project using certain quality management tools and methods such as benchmarking and control charts. The report also explored various cultural, legal and human resource related issues that can arise on a project and explained how quality control processes can be helpful in overcoming these challenges. Some challenges related to the cultures that were identified in the report include language barriers, differences in working styles and work ethics. Legally, problems can occur due to differences in laws and regulatory compliance procedures that have to be taken care of by the project. One way is to overcome these challenges is to provide training to project teams on related aspects. However, this could also be challenging because of the learning differences, cost implications and time factors.

References

Ahmed, M. I. (2009). Works :Changing the Quality Culture Towards Total Quality Works :Changing the Quality Culture Towards Total Quality Management. University of Mosul.

Atkinson, R. (1999). Project Management: Cost, Time and Quality, two best guesses and a phenomenon , its time to accept other sucess criteria. Bournemouth University.

Cleland, D. I., & Gareis, R. (2006). Global Project Management Handbook: Planning, Organizing, and Controlling International Projects. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

E&C. (2015, June 5). Quality Assurance Standards. Retrieved October 24, 2015, from Event and Conference Co.: https://www.eventandconferenceco.com.au/quality-assurance-standards/

FAO. (2014). The FAO Statistics Quality Assurance Framework. FAO.

Fung, P. K. (2015). Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) Introduction. Hong Kong Society for Quality.

Giese, H. (2005). Software Quality Assurance:VI Standards. University of Paderborn.

Goff, S. (2008). Measuring and Managing Project Quality . ProjectExperts.

Hauptfleisch, A., Campbell, M., & Kajimo-Shakantu, K. (2014). Public Private Partnerships: Procurement interventions; financial viability and long term project control. ICEC.

Huemann, M. (2004). Improving Quality In Projects And Programs. Vienna University for Economics and Business Administration.

Lock, D., & Scott, L. (2017). Gower Handbook of People in Project Management. GPM First.

Lovric-Pernak, K. (2017). International legal issues and EU projects. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

McGregor, F. (2004). Quality management/change management: two sides of the same coin? University of Wollongong.

Morris, P., & Pinto, J. K. (2004). The Wiley Guide to Managing Projects. Wiley & Sons.

Rodrigues, I., & Sbragia, R. (2013). The Cultural Challenges of Managing Global Project Teams: a Study of Brazilian Multinationals. Journal of Technology , Management & Innovation, 38-52.

Salgé, F. (2000). Handbook For Implementing A Quality Management System In A National Mapping Agency. CERCO.

UAS. (2012). The Project Quality Review Process (PQRP). UAS.

Vinaja, R. (2001). Major Challenges In Multi-Cultural Virtual Teams. University of Texas-Pan American.

Winograd, M., Mallett, R. L., Bunton, W., & Hayashida, C. (2007). Best Practices In Achieving Workforce Diversity. U.S. Department Of Commerce.