MGMT 645 Week 1 DB Forum 1 Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread

MGMT 645 Quality Management, Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the remodeling project are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Rose's text, the PMBOK Guide, the scholarly sources and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 645.

Last spring our remodeling company finished a kitchen for a retired couple: new maple cabinets, a quartz countertop, a gas range and a dishwasher, all installed exactly as drawn. The county inspector passed the electrical and plumbing work on the first visit, the countertop seams were invisible, and the final walk-through punch list had only two items. Three days after we left, the homeowner called. The dishwasher sat at the end of the run beside the new pantry, and when the dishwasher door was open, the pantry door could not swing past it. She had to close one to use the other several times a day. Every item had been built to specification. The kitchen still did not work.

That story captures the central tension in defining quality. Crosby (1979) defined quality as conformance to requirements, which made quality measurable and put responsibility on getting the requirements right. By that definition, our kitchen was a quality job. Juran's alternative, that quality means fitness for use, judges the product by whether it serves the customer's purpose, and by that definition we failed (Juran & Godfrey, 1999). The two definitions agree only when the requirements capture what the customer actually needs, and ours did not: the drawings placed the dishwasher where plumbing was cheapest without anyone asking how the homeowner moved around the room.

Rose (2014) argues that project quality must be planned from the beginning around the customer's needs, rather than inspected into the product at the end. Our process did the opposite. We had a detailed inspection checklist, which caught crooked doors and uneven seams, but our design review asked only whether the drawings met code and fit the budget. Dean and Bowen (1994), reviewing total quality management, identified customer focus as one of its core principles alongside continuous improvement and teamwork, and that principle was absent from our design stage. The PMBOK Guide also distinguishes quality from grade: quality is the degree to which a product's characteristics fulfill requirements, while grade describes products with the same use but different features (Project Management Institute, 2017). Our kitchen was high grade, with expensive materials, but it was not high quality, because it did not fulfill the requirement that mattered most to the person using it.

After that call, we added a step to our design process: the designer walks the homeowner through a full day in the planned kitchen, door by door, using a floor plan with every swing drawn in. It takes forty minutes. In the six kitchens since, it has caught four conflicts that the drawings and the inspector would never have found.

Exodus records that the craftsman Bezalel was chosen by name for the tabernacle and given the Spirit's gifts of skill and understanding for designing and for working metal, cutting stone and carving wood (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Exodus 31:1-5). Bezalel's craftsmanship was measured by how well it served the purpose of the place, not only by how finely it was cut. For a Christian builder, quality is a form of service to the people who will live with the work.

Classmates: have you worked on a project that met its specifications and still disappointed the people it was for?

References

Crosby, P. B. (1979). Quality is free: The art of making quality certain. McGraw-Hill.

Dean, J. W., Jr., & Bowen, D. E. (1994). Management theory and total quality: Improving research and practice through theory development. Academy of Management Review, 19(3), 392-418. https://doi.org/10.2307/258933

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Juran, J. M., & Godfrey, A. B. (Eds.). (1999). Juran's quality handbook (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (6th ed.).

Rose, K. H. (2014). Project quality management: Why, what and how (2nd ed.). J. Ross Publishing.