Real-World Project Management: Beyond Conventional Wisdom, Best Practices, and Project Methodologies

Chapter 7. Negotiating the "Quality Quagmire"

"The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end."

—Douglas Adams

We had quality processes in the mid-to-late 1940s here in the United States. The U.S. Army was one of the largest implementers of SQC (System Quality Control) processes in the world. American quality guru Dr. W. Edwards Deming was instrumental in setting up and helping the army to implement these processes. Then World War II ended, and when the dust cleared, U.S. industry found itself in the enviable position of being the only power in the world with industrial capacity that had not been severely crippled or completely blown up.

The world needed goods, and the U.S. could produce them. As a result, the quality message got lost in favor of U.S. industry's new battle cry, "quantity!" When you're in the catbird seat, you can get away with almost anything, and this worked for a while until U.S. industry started experiencing an unscratchable itch—something they had not noticed in quite some time—something called competition.

While American business had, for the most part, abandoned quality processes in favor of dumping goods on the market as fast as they could produce them, the competition was at work implementing the quality concepts brought to them by Dr. ...