MGMT 645 Week 6 Quality Improvement Plan Example

Quality Improvement Plan: Raising First-Upload Completeness in the CPA Firm's Client Portal

Purpose and Baseline

The project management plan set a target that at least 85 percent of client document sets would arrive complete in the opening month of tax season. In the week-three pilot with 30 clients, 18 of the 30 document sets, 60 percent, were complete on first upload. The 12 incomplete sets contained 41 separate defects, an average of more than three each. This plan uses quality tools from Rose (2014) to find where those defects arise, sets improvements to remove their main causes before the full client rollout, and defines how results will be measured once the season begins.

Tool 1: Process Flowchart

The client's path through the portal has seven steps:

• 1. Client receives the invitation email and creates a login.
• 2. Client opens the document checklist built from the prior-year return.
• 3. Client gathers documents at home, from paper forms and online accounts.
• 4. Client uploads each document by phone photo or file and matches it to a checklist item.
• 5. Client marks items not applicable or adds documents not on the list.
• 6. Client submits the set, and the portal notifies the assigned staff member.
• 7. Staff member reviews the set against the checklist and requests anything missing.

The flowchart shows that steps 3 and 4 happen entirely outside the firm's view, and that the firm learns about a defect only at step 7, after the client believes the work is finished. Rose (2014) presents flowcharts as a way to see where a process can fail, and this one points to the gathering and uploading steps.

Tool 2: Check Sheet

During the pilot, staff recorded every defect found at step 7 on a check sheet with predefined categories.

Tool 3: Pareto Analysis

Three defect types account for 32 of the 41 defects, 78 percent. Juran's principle of the vital few, the observation that a small number of causes usually produce most of the problems, holds here (Juran & Godfrey, 1999), and the improvement effort will concentrate on those three.

Tool 4: Cause-and-Effect Diagram

A cause-and-effect diagram, the fishbone tool associated with Ishikawa, was built for each of the three leading defects with categories for the client, the checklist, the portal and the firm's instructions. The main causes found were:

• Missing brokerage statements. Checklist: the item read "1099 forms," which clients did not connect to their brokerage account's consolidated statement. Client: consolidated 1099s arrive in mid-February, after many clients start uploading. Instructions: nothing told clients to wait for late forms.
• Prior-year documents uploaded. Client: many keep all tax papers in one folder and pick the first matching form. Portal: the upload screen did not show the tax year prominently. Instructions: no reminder about the year.
• Unreadable phone photos. Portal: the phone upload accepted any image without a quality check. Client: photos were taken at an angle or in poor light. Instructions: no guidance on how to photograph a document.

Improvement Actions

Each action below answers one cause from the diagram. The actions were chosen because they change the process itself, the checklist, the screen and the instructions, rather than asking clients to try harder. Rose (2014) emphasizes that lasting quality improvements come from fixing the system that produces defects, and every action here is a change to that system.

Link to the Project Management Plan

The plan's targets and measures come directly from the quality management plan written in Module/Week 3. The 85 percent completeness target and the zero-misfiling target are unchanged. The checkpoints are the same as well, checklist review before invitations, the pilot and weekly reporting in the season, with one addition: a second, smaller pilot to test the improvements. The schedule absorbs the second pilot without moving the January 12 completion date, because it uses two days the original plan had reserved for invitation corrections. The improvements cost about $300 in vendor time, which the project's $1,000 reserve covers.

Measurement and the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle

The improvements will be tested with a second group of 20 clients on December 29 and 30 before the main invitations go out, using the improvement loop that Deming (1986) credited to Shewhart: plan, do, check and act. The plan step is the action table above. The do step is the small second pilot. In the check step, the office administrator will compare first-upload completeness and the defect tally with the first pilot. In the act step, the operations manager will adopt the changes for all clients if completeness reaches at least 80 percent, or adjust them if it does not.

For the season's first four weeks, staff will continue the check sheet for every incomplete set, and the operations manager will report weekly the percentage of sets complete on first upload and the number of misfiled documents, the two quality criteria in the charter. The PMBOK Guide's control quality process calls for measuring outputs against requirements to decide whether corrective action is needed (Project Management Institute, 2017), and the weekly report is that measurement. If completeness falls below 85 percent for two consecutive weeks, the team will repeat the Pareto analysis on that period's defects and choose the next improvement. The tools turned a vague complaint, clients upload the wrong things, into three specific defects with causes the firm can remove before the season starts.

References

Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the crisis. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

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.