FBLT040 | Project Management | Quality Issues at Camstruction Ltd

Background

Camstruction are a company specialising in the construction of residential housing in the East of England. With revenues exceeding GBP £30 million in the Financial Year 2016/17 they have grown from a small company started by David Dunster in the 1980s to a major player in the region. The company are proud of their claim that 5% of houses built in the last 15 years in Cambridgeshire have been Camstruction homes and this compares favourably with the large national house builders such as Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey. However, David, who is still chairman of the company is concerned with the amount of quality issues the company is having as they have grown in size.

Having consulted his Managing Director Dylan James, it is clear that in the last 4 months 85 homes have been completed, of which 15 had quality issues flagged up by building control (A local government department) which were serious enough to prevent the houses being sold. A further 32 had issues reported by the residents after moving in, some requiring up to £40,000 of remedial work. The average selling price for a Camstruction house is £300,000. David has said this rate of problems has been increasing year on year and is affecting the ability for the company to grow, additionally, preventing a takeover bid from a large multinational 2 years ago due to their costs regarding fixing issues.

Dylan insists that the amount of rework they are doing is in-line with the industry average and showed a report from YouGov for Shelter that indicated that 51% of new home buyers reported issues with their homes.

Dylan referred to pressure from increasing supplier costs and the need to produce a certain amount of social housing in their developments for a fixed budget from government which isn’t keeping track with increasing costs. In addition, many overseas workers have been leaving the UK due to Brexit fears. However, David has insisted quality must be improved. You have been recruited by Mr Dylan James as Project Transformation Officer (PTO) with 4 months to research the quality issues at Camstruction and produce a white paper to be presented at the board’s quarterly meeting. You will be running your research as a project in its own right, utilising the help of consultants and have been given two secretaries to assist. Your research will involve travel for you and the consultants and associated costs.

Your report should cover a robust plan for quality improvement, on site and in the head office. This will involve new business processes, software and whatever else is deemed necessary to improve quality throughout the business. Dylan has left a copy of Project Management by Harvey Maylor on your desk on your first day, so assume your recommendations will need to be fully referenced.

Timescale

You have four months to deliver the report and plan the introduction of a new quality system for projects.

Budget

Your budget for this project is £300,000. This will cover all costs for new software, hardware, travel to meetings and consultants costs. The only costs this budget would not cover would be the salaries of any project managers seconded full or part-time to support you (if you choose to use them). They would draw their salaries exactly as usual from their unit which does not impact on your budget.

Staffing

Personnel allocated for your study are: two secretaries with a salary at £3000 p.c.m. (per calendar month) each, and two consultants at £750 per day each.

The implementation of the new Project Structure

The following is an outline plan for the project, which will be expected to be written up in a Gantt Chart:

Identification of best practices of Project Management Quality Delivery: you need to meet with all project managers of Camstruction to identify best practices and project weaknesses.

This should take no more than 20 working days. This should include information about current projects, measures to control processes, and current planning and evaluation techniques.

This should be followed by Detailed Analysis of Project Management practices (10 days) and Outline of improvement initiatives (10 days) – these activities can run at the same time in parallel. Then, as soon as the next activity; Detailed Description of the new Project Standards (10 days) is complete you could start Training Plan Design (5 days).

Proposal of Project changes should be discussed internally for 10 days and can be done in parallel with the two tasks above.

Depending on your requirements, you should create up to 10 more activities and/or milestones supporting the research, creation and training of a new project quality approach.

Presentation of final report is a final milestone. Please check for public holidays during the project duration. When asked about who works on what tasks the following information was handed over to you from the consultant’s quotation (the letters in brackets stand for: S1 and S2 = Secretaries, C1 and C2 = Consultants). Please note that these are only suggestions.

As Project Transformation Officer you can adapt this as necessary:

Identification of best practices of Project Management Communication (no more than 20 days) (PTO, C1, C2, S1) Detailed Analysis of Project Management quality practices (10 days) (PTO, C1, C2)

Outline of improvement initiatives (10 days) (PTO, C1, C2) Detailed Description of the new Project Standards (10 days) (PTO, C1, C2, S1, S2) Training Plan Design (5 days) (PTO, C1, C2) Proposal of Project changes (10 days) (PTO, C1, C2, S1, S2) ... [add more activities as required] Discussion of report with MD (PTO, C1, C2) Writing-up of final report (PTO, C1, C2, S1, S2) Presentation of final report (1 day)

In your role of the Chief Project Planning Manager you are required to develop a report (including academic references), structured along the following lines:

1. Critically evaluate the relationships between Time, Cost and Quality within Project Management. ?

2. What steps can be taken to improve the quality of the product provision at Camstruction?

3. What are the key strengths of a Quality Management Approach?

4. What are the key measures and tactics to implement a new approach that reduces the quality problems?

5. How will customers benefit from the new approach?

6. How will Camstruction become more competitive? There needs to be a critical, and reflective approach to the report, but as it is for the Company Chair, it needs focussed and direct advice with a clear plan for the business going forward.

Answer:

Project quality management is a procedural process that involves the establishment of a certain anticipated quality at the beginning of the project, and then maintaining the same quality till the project comes to completion (Rever, 2018). Therefore, Camstruction Company project quality management should strive to see to it that its projects not only produce products that can accomplish a given task, but to create products that are able to meet task requirements as well as other quality related measures such as the approach of construction, durability, and materials used only but to mention a few. That means that Camstruction Company project quality management will have to consider some key factors such as planning and defining what quality is, carrying out quality assurance and undertaking quality control to avoid the current product quality issues complaints from customers and the incurring of extra charges renovating the houses.

Planning Quality Management: Accordingly, before Camstruction Company start its project, it is important to analyze the quality level that has to be put in the given product. Consequently, it is not good to only say that the project manager wishes to create a product of “as high standards as possible.” Quality is primarily connected to cost. Therefore, Camstruction Company project manager should factor in a project budget as part of their planning course. Certainly, it is advisable to use the best possible available materials that can be afforded. However these materials are supposed to be cost-effective (Rever, 2018). Even though the quality planning process can be complex since it is supposed to balance the interest of general quality as well as the reality of the specified budget, it is important to ensure that project communication exists throughout the project life cycle. Thus, at the time of planning, it is vital to outline exactly in what manner quality will be measured during the project. Subsequently, by being specific about what defines the project quality, it helps to take the project along towards ensuring that the following step becomes easier and more effective

Performing quality assurance: This steps deals with outlining the way in which the project will have to successfully meet the laid down planned by putting it into action. Therefore, the approach that is intended for use at the time the project has to align with the quality goals which have earlier on been outlined. During this phase, experience plays a significant role in making sure that the project manager is fully aware of the type of processes that are likely to result in quality. So as to enhance quality it is important to undertake quality auditing by identifying points where best practices have to be implemented, support the project team to implement quality, identify places where the best practices have not been employed, give the project sponsor assurance of quality and sharing of best practices that have been proved in similar project (Kandelousi, Ooi and Abdollahi, 2011). Consequently, instead of scrambling in the middle of the project to make quality adjustments, the project should put in place independent and structured reviews as part of the project quality assurance. Thus, the quality audits help to determine the “fit” of a projects practices to the policies of the projects and that of the company.

Quality control: It involves activities used for evaluation to determine if the product can attain the quality requirements which are specified or the project. As a result, quality control is essential for Camstruction Company project management as it makes sure that all things are done within the scope of project planning.

What are the key measures and tactics to implement a new approach that reduces the quality problems?

Some of the best project management measures and tactics that Camstruction Company should employed to reduce quality related problems include the following:

Defining the project scope and objectives: It is essential that Camstruction Company understand the scope of its project since scope describes the restrictions of the project. At the same time, it is important to understand a project’s objectives because deciding on the actual project objectives will aid in planning the project (FTA, 2018).

Define the project deliverables: It is important that Camstruction Company describe what its construction project is supposed to deliver. In this sense, the company’s project manager should understand the tangible items that have to be delivered and then documenting them exhaustively to make it possible for any other person to be able to effectively and correctly produce the desired product.

Project planning: Planning demands that the project manager decides on which resources, people, and budget are needed to accomplish a given project. It is essential to define all activities that are needed for the generating the deliverables with the help of techniques like Work Breakdown Structures (FTA, 2018). The plan will help Camstruction Company project manager to know what to check, and carry out that is essential to realizing project quality. Generally, the project deliverables have to include a plan regarding the manner in which the project manager together with the team shall have to maintain high-quality standards throughout the entire project lifecycle. Therefore, the project manager has to approximate the time as well as efforts needed for each activity, the correlation between these activities and then come up with a realistic schedule to accomplish these activities. On the same note, it is important to include the project team in the approximating the length of the activities by setting millstones that indicate critical dates in the project cycle. All these have to be included in the project plan, and then these activities have to be reviewed by major shareholders to ensure they agree with the plan.

Communication: The project plan for Camstruction Company will be useless not unless it is effectively communicated to the project team since each team member should clearly understand their responsibilities.

Tracking and reporting the progress of the project: Once the project is on-going, it is significant that Camstruction Company project manager monitors and make a comparison between the actual progress to the planned progress. The project manager will have to get this project reports from the project team and then document any differences between the planned and actual scope, schedule and cost (Kandelousi, Ooi and Abdollahi, 2011). Additionally, all variations should be reported to the project manager and core stakeholders for corrective actions to be undertaken.

Good measurement: It is essential to identify the primary results besides outputs of the project and in what way to quantity if they have been provided. Therefore the company’s project managers should execute processes which measure progress all through the project at the team and entire project level (Bobera, 2008). Consequently, this makes sure that all problems are identified early enough and successful tactics promulgated throughout the project.

Constant review: Together with good measure, Camstruction Company project managers should continuously and thoroughly review the project development against its, budget, schedule and quality aspects (Gunawan, 2018). Constant review enables early problem identification to enable for corrective action to be undertaken and keep the project on track.

Bibliography

Bobera, D. (2008). Project Management Organization. [online] https://www.ef.uns.ac.rs/mis/archive-pdf. Available at: https://www.lgu.edu.lb/content/wp-content/uploads/courses/Quality%20management.pdf [Accessed 2 Jul. 2018].

FTA. (2018). Key Factors of Successful Project Implementation. [online] Available at: https://www.transit.dot.gov/regulations-and-guidance/key-factors-successful-project-implementation [Accessed 2 Jul. 2018].

Gunawan, D. (2018). [online] Iopscience.iop.org. Available at: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/308/1/012001/pdf [Accessed 2 Jul. 2018].

Kandelousi, N., Ooi, J. and Abdollahi, A. (2018). [online] Waset.org. Available at: https://waset.org/publications/8740/key-success-factors-for-managing-projects [Accessed 2 Jul. 2018].

Rever, H. (2018). Quality in project management--a practical look at chapter 8 of the PMBOK® guide. [online] Pmi.org. Available at: https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/quality-project-management-tools-7177 [Accessed 2 Jul. 2018].

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