Introduction: Project Management Standards
Quality assurance is among one of the most essential steps in creating any kind of products or services. In order to make the process of quality assessment simpler and make sure that the products created by the organisation in question, as well as the services suggested by it to the target customers, one must comply with the existing quality standards.
Specifically, the project management standards concerning the quality of the final product must be introduced into the framework of organisations.
However, since a typical production process incorporates far too many elements and is affected by too many factors to take into account when designing a quality management standards approach, most of the latter have certain flaws.
Although it is barely possible to locate the one that can be viewed as an impeccable quality assurance tool, the standards that are related to the accepted knowledge system should be viewed as an option due to the opportunities for embracing a vast amount of characteristics of the production process and, therefore, helps locate the largest amount of possible flaws in the products or services delivered.
Advantages of Standards Application: When Everything Goes According to a Plan
According to the state law, every company must align its activities with the basic principles listed in the military standards. For instance, the quality regulations imposed on the project members by the state military services, such as the MIL-STD-498 standard, presuppose that the technology used by the company should be up-to-date and properly documented (Lucius 2002).
Therefore, the military standards state that organisations have to comply with address the issues such as the safety of the data that the company acquires, stores and distributes.
As a result, the organisation remains secure from the attacks of the people, who may want to use the personal data of the staff for their selfish and illegal purposes. In addition, the company will be able to protect its data concerning the production processes, revenues, partners, etc. without letting it leak to their competitors.
As far as the ISO standards are concerned, the advantages of their application are quite obvious. Being widely recognised as one of the most efficient systems for assuring high quality performance within an organisation, the specified approach has passed the time test with flying colours:
ISO 9001:2008 sets out the criteria for a quality management system and is the only standard in the family that can be certified to (although this is not a requirement). It can be used by any organisation, large or small, regardless of its field of activity (‘ISO 9000 – Quality management’ 2008, par. 1).
In other words, it has been proven both in theory and in practice that the ISO standards allow for managing the quality assurance process within an organisation impeccably. In addition, the ISO standards guarantee that the company may still exercise certain flexibility in defining its approaches towards quality management.
The emphasis on a continuous improvement, which the ISO standards allow to make, can also be deemed as rather important for the companies that plan to grow and expand into the global market. Finally, the fact that the ISO quality management principles are applicable to any business setting deserves to be mentioned as one of the most obvious advantages of the system.
The application of the government standards also has its positive effects on the overall performance of the company, as well as on the safety of the environment. To be more exact, most of the state quality standards for entrepreneurships concern compliance with the existing rules for environmental safety.
For instance, the PRINCE2 (PRojects IN a Controlled Environment, version 2) standard creates the premises for structuring the relationships between the project members in a manner as efficient and expeditious as possible by identifying their roles and responsibilities quickly ().
Therefore, it can be viewed as an essential addition to the design of the project. It should be born in mind, though, that the PRINCE approach towards quality assurance is twofold; herein both the key challenge and the key advantage of the approach lies.
According to the existing evidence, it is the ability of the project leader to navigate between the quality assurance and the project assurance processes that makes the framework in question so efficient ().
PRINCE highlights the significance of both the provision of quality and the environment, in which quality assurance is possible. In other words, the specified framework helps view the process of quality assurance as the effect of an efficient leadership strategy.
Thus, the PRINCE framework helps link the elements and the members of the project into a single entity, which is obviously positive characteristic, as it helps enhance cooperation between the members.
Disadvantages of Standards Application: Bound by the Indefeasible Laws of PM
It should be noted, though, that, despite the seeming efficacy of the existing standards for project management, the application of the standards in question may also trigger a variety of side effects.
Specifically, the fact that the implementation of the ISO standards is fraught with major difficulties can be considered a reason for concern. Moreover, the very taxonomy of the ISO principles, i.e., their belonging to the quality standards has been questioned several times.
According to the evaluation of the specified approach to quality management says that “A review of the ISO 9000:2000 series will confirm that only a small part – about 12 % of its content – is ‘auditable’” (Wade 2002, p. 17).
The ISO standards are, however, not the only regulations, the implementation of which may trigger undesirable implication for the organisation that resorts to their use. Specifically, the issue concerning the government quality standards needs to be mentioned.
The above-mentioned PRINCE approach, despite all its positive effects in terms of restructuring the project hierarchy and promoting clarity of the key processes, has a major disadvantage – once a single member stops complying with the role that they are assigned with, the entire process is stalled.
While admittedly offering enough information for introducing a rigid hierarchy into the organisation, the specified tools do not provide a backup plan in case one of the members fails to meet the requirements.
The military standards also have a set of rather predictable issues to address in the course of the project management process. As a rule, the standards in question do not age well and have to be updated on a regular basis, which makes the process of following these standards rather complicated.
For example, the MIL-Q-STD 9858 regulation, which supposedly helps organisations in quality management processes regarding procurement (Lucius 2002), can be considered one of the prime examples of the quality standards that wore out their welcome much faster than a new set of regulations was issued (Lucius 2002, p. 2).
Conclusion: Locating the Grounds for a Possible Compromise
Although each of the quality standards suggested has its problems due to its limitations, it can be suggested that one can promote improvements in the quality management process by enhancing the accepted knowledge approach.
Despite being rather basic and providing only a surface assessment of the products and services quality, the specified approach will help identify the key disadvantages of the product or service under analysis, as it allows for incorporating the vastest range of factors affecting quality.
Therefore, while the rest of the approaches can be viewed as passable, it is the accepted knowledge strategy that helps an organisation develop enough flexibility in assessing its product quality and at the same time take every single factor that counts into consideration (Kidney, Cummings & Boehm 2007).
Although the ISO standards offer admittedly much flexibility in terms of the assessment procedure, they are prone to delivering an impressive percentage of inaccuracy (Wade 2012). The military standards, in their turn, can be viewed as far too binding, whereas the governmental ones do not allow for taking the specifics of the organisation that is being assessed into account.
The accepted knowledge strategies, in their turn, can be enhanced by combining them with some of the governmental regulations that do not affect the production process negatively and at the same time enhance the performance of the staff members.
It should be kept in mind, though, that the key state quality standards such as PRINCE should also be considered as an opportunity for improving the project design quality, since they help redistribute roles and responsibilities among the members, thus, enhancing the production process.
It could be argued, though, that the promotion of military standards among the project members may also contribute to the project development. Though military regulations can be viewed as rather restricting, they still promote a range of ideas that the project members can make an efficient use of.
For example, the above-mentioned standard concerning the use of updated equipment for data storage, though having become quite dubious as time passed, offers a lot of useful food for thoughts. Though clearly having become controversial, it still gets a very important message concerning the necessity to upgrade the security system across.
Indeed, in the modern era of cyber communication, the problem of cyber attacks has become especially big, and the avenues for facilitating cyber security are being sought currently.
By taking the above-mentioned standard into account and searching the ways of upgrading the project management IT equipment, one will be able to protect essential information and not only prevent attacks, but also provide the chances for the leaders of the projects to manage the cyber attacks efficiently (Yan, Qian, Sharif & Tipper 2012).
Therefore, choosing a single quality management system that will create the premises for quality management and quality assurance is barely possible; instead, a company must incorporate several quality management approaches based on the sets of principles provided by various organisations; thus, a flexible approach that allows for making a compromise between the corporate values and the state standards can be located and followed.
Consequently, the integration of several approaches, including the ISO, the military and government quality standards, and other strategies, which will help improve the quality of the product, will have to be integrated into the project’s framework.
Reference List
‘ISO 9000 – Quality management’ 2008, ISO, <https://www.iso.org/iso-9001-quality-management.html>.
Kidney, J, Cummings, L & Boehm, A 2007, ‘Toward a quality assurance approach to e-learning courses,’ International Journal on E-Learning, vol. 6, no. 1, 17-30.
Lucius, T J 2002, Department of Defense Quality Management Systems and ISO 9000:2000, Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CA.
Wade, J 2002, ‘Is ISO 9000 really a standard?,’ ISO Management Systems, <https://www.iso.org/home.html>.
Yan, Y, Qian, Y, Sharif, H & Tipper, D 2012, ‘A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications,’ IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 998–1010.