Category Archives: Education

Better Quality Management – Product and Services

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Better quality management requires reflecting the needs and wants of the business, for example, if you are making a variety of products, you may need to set quality target for each product and look at quality targets for each one. Even if the business is mainly based on providing a service to customers, you will still want to make a decision how you will keep a make sure on the quality of what you offer. When you have enhanced the quality of your products and services, you will probably have a quality policy for the business, a quality part for the business plan and clear instruction for employees about what to do to maintain quality.

Make sure you collect information on quality from all those involved in the business, using outside expert advice if you need it. Before making a quality objective for your organization find out what your competitors do about quality, and how pleased your customers are by the level of quality you have set.

You need to be familiar with and appreciate the quality management practice and how you can implement it into the business. You need to know the how quality helps the business goals and targets, how to explain what quality and quality management are to those people concerned. Also have the knowledge of their different ways of bringing quality into the business, and how to decide which is the best for the business?

Looking at the entire business processes and activities to improve product and service quality: What information from your own business is helpful when looking at better quality management – How to measure quality standards, Where you can get information about quality systems and quality procedures, How you can find out what your customers look forward to in relation to quality management, How you can find out about what your competitors make about quality.

How to keep up to date with new opportunities, threats, and weaknesses of competitors and what they are likely to be. To manage quality for product and services you should quantify your business, measure where you are, organizes all operations in the company, reduce operation cost by adopting other quality techniques, and increase your customer base by giving better services and products at lower cost.

I hope in this article, you get some useful quality management tips and techniques for your products and services.

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Education Loans – Give Wings to Your High Education Dreams

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Education begins at home and has been looked upon as the progressive medium to open the so called doors of our ignorance. In other words, the process of education in the truest sense needs to be limited to the concerned man who insists on knowing more -the rest is mere sheep-herding. However, these days, leading a smooth life seems to be very difficult. If you earn a handsome amount after the end of a month then the most important aspect of your life can get ignored. But the hard toll of expenses have not even spared this domain out of its spell. As a matter of fact, the process of education has become a real swine business which means our dreams for higher education would definitely depend upon our earnings.

In any situation, any parent would not like to gift a illiterate life to his children. To solve this grim cases, various types of loans have been conceptualised. The expenses of higher education can, however, be easily borne with the support of the so called student education loans. These loans have been specially crafted, keeping in mind the bright prospect of higher education. These days, a wide variety of subjects such as science, social science, English etc., form the basis of our education system. The children can be let loose to explore the subjects and get education from the most preferred universities with the support of such special loans. These loans would responsibly take care of all the educational expenses such as hostel fees, tuition fees etc., at ease.

With these educational loans, people can easily case their dreams of reaching an eminent position in high-profile companies, offices etc. Today the education scenario looks only brighter to those people who come blessed with sufficient amount of money. However, otherwise the students are forced to either indulge into certain part-time jobs or quit studies. But with the introduction of these types of loans, it seems like nothing can stop the parents now from offering a bright future to their children.

The education loans are the most preferred loans these days due to various reasons. In fact, the repayment mode of these type of loans are very attractive. Almost every educational loan has to be repaid only after the concerned borrower starts earning. Of course, such loans are specially made for students who are opting for professional courses. Apart from the professional courses, other courses come with the option of equal monthly installments. Which means in such a case, the concerned borrower or the parents of the student should repay the amount on the basis of monthly installments. As such, both these cases can be summarised as follows – the repayment period of the professional courses usually starts after the completion of the course while the repayment period of other courses starts instantly after the loan gets sanctioned.

Apart from the student education loans, one can even avail personal loans at flexible terms and conditions. Due to the low personal loan interest rates, the Indian loan market has been on an all-time high. The economic reforms of 1991 introduced by the PV Narasimha government have been able to positively stimulate the Indian economy to a considerable extent. The positive trends can be still noticed, with the economy of India turning itself from a debtor to a creditor of the IMF (International Monetary Fund).

However, the eligibility criteria for getting student education loans are not very scary. The applicant of the loan should be at least of the age of 18 years or above 18 years of age. The concerned borrower should have a current bank account. Moreover, the repayment options and the terms of qualification are just adding more points to such special types of loans. These type of loans come both in secured and unsecured forms. Secured loans are quite easy to avail as the security pledged validates the authenticity of the borrower. However, these form of loans come boosted with low interest interest rates, hassle-free terms and conditions and stress free repayment options. The unsecured loans on the other hand requires a pledged security from the concerned borrower. As in these type of loans, almost 75 per cent of the risk needs to be borne by the lender and certain strict terms and conditions enhance the lending amount safety and repayment. The rates of interest which come associated with these loans are slightly high yet affordable. The students have every right and power now to get their focus right and study for their own betterment as well as for the society.

There’s Quality and There’s Project Quality!

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Budgets and timeframes are integral elements of project management and are often the key elements used when assessing a project’s performance. However a key question that should be included in the mix is “did the project deliver what was expected”.

But what is quality and how does it apply to projects?

Quality means different things to different people. In the traditional sense, quality may be used to describe something produced by a craftsman. From a manufacturing perspective quality is understood as being within tolerances or free from defects. However, from a project management perspective, quality relates to performance against the pre-determined standards, including:

· Whether the project was completed on time · Whether the project was completed within budget · Whether the delivered project outcome met organisational needs · Whether a the deliverable met its required specifications; or · Whether the stakeholders were satisfied.

Ultimately quality management in a project is aimed ensuring project success and reducing the risk of project failure, be that due to technical defects or to poor stakeholder satisfaction.

Planning Quality up Front

To ensure quality is planned from the beginning and implemented throughout the project lifecycle, the production of a ‘Quality Management Plan’ is recommended.

Many organisations use project management methodologies that provide guidance as to the necessary content. AZ/NZS39095: Guide to Quality in Projects is also an excellent reference.

The Quality Management Plan should identify any specific standards the project needs to meet and should clearly identify the success criteria against which the project’s performance can be assessed. Whilst it is human nature to always think in terms of budget or schedule, in many cases projects that are delivered on time and with budget have been deemed to be catastrophic failures as they did not deliver the outcome that was expected.

The purpose of quality management in projects is to ensure that the project outputs delivered are ‘fit-for-purpose’, that is, they meet the required specifications and standards, perform as expected and are delivered on time. This applies not only to technical aspects, but also to documentation and plans.

It’s not all technical

A common mistake that project managers face is that they only focus on the product or technical solution when examining quality. Whilst most put in place appropriate testing, walkthroughs/inspections and systems pilots, many do not pay appropriate attention to the project management aspects. This includes:

· Examining whether the current forms of communication are effective · Ensuring that all the right resources available and working at the required time · Providing correct and accurate reports to the necessary stakeholders on time · Verifying that the actual scope is still in-line with that described in the plan

Managing project quality is not complex. It’s about identifying all the deliverables at the start and deciding how to best confirm their quality, be that through testing, inspection, validation, reviews or observation.

Quality at what cost?

All projects operate within the time/cost/quality triple constraint. As with any planning activity, there is a cost in performing quality checks but this is offset by not having to fix problems down the track. Experience tells us that the later you find a problem, the longer it takes to fix or the larger the impact.

‘Sorting it out later’ might be easier and less costly, however, this may not be an option depending on the nature of the project, or the projects objective. For example, a project involving organisational change would see satisfied or fully-engaged stakeholders as critical and as such things need to be right first time irrespective of the cost.

Quality Management in Small Projects

A ‘Quality Management Plan’ should be produced irrespective of the size, scope and timeframes of a project however it should ‘scaled’ in size and detail accordingly.

Small projects rely more on individual quality activities. Project managers of smaller projects don’t usually apply formal quality management processes as they don’t have time to get through the metrics collection and process improvement steps.

Summary

The way project managers choose to manage quality should be appropriate to the size and scope of the project.

Larger or more complex projects will need a formal quality management plan and processes. Smaller projects need to make sure they identify and implement specific quality activities within the project plan.

A good rule of thumb is that the value of the effort and time needed to manage quality should not exceed the value that you expect to gain from the quality management process. This of course must be weighed up against the required level of stakeholder satisfaction.