Tag Archives: quality

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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Furniture Painting DIY – How to Paint Wooden Furniture at Home

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With usage, paint of wooden furniture becomes fad and furniture looks old and worn. In fact the wood structure of furniture remains intact for many years, it only needs a re-painting process to look like new. Painting home furniture is not a difficult process and you can do it yourself by adhering the following suggestions.

Tools and Materials Needed For Job

  • Brush
  • Foam Roller
  • Sand Paper
  • Wood filler (Putty)
  • Wood Filler Knife
  • Paint-Primer
  • Paint
  • Lacquer or Sealant (optional)
  • Face mask
  • Gloves

Preparing the Home Furniture for Painting Process

Select a well ventilated place and use cloth or plastic sheets to place furniture over it. Clean the furniture and fill the pitted, uneven and scratched areas with wood filler. Apply wood filler and wipe off excessive with a filler knife. Also use wood filler in joints for firm attachment. When wood filler is dried, use sand paper to get smoother surfaces. Now clean the furniture well with a liquid and then with a lint free cloth.

Using Paint-Primer Before Painting

Primer is useful to make the coat of paint to adhere evenly to the wood as well as to get the paint long-lasting. Without primer, paint peel off after few months or a year. Use paint brush on corners and edges and roller on flat surfaces to apply the primer. Don’t worry for the even application of primer, it will be fixed in next steps. When primer has dried, sand it with a fine grit sand paper and then clean the sawdust.

Painting the Home Furniture

Now furniture is ready for applying the paint. Use foam roller on flat surfaces and then paint brush on uneven surfaces and where the roller could not reach. Use paint conditioner to slow down the drying edge of the paint. It helps to make the paint coat more even. Apply a second coat of paint if necessary and let it dry.

Sealant or Lacquer

Although you are done, but for a shiny look, you may like to use paint-sealant at this final stage. It protect the furniture from scratches and add a gloss over it. Again, let the lacquer to dry well before moving the furniture.

Safety Precautions

For personal safety, use good quality face mask to prevent the harmful effects of fumes of paint-chemicals. Carry out all this painting in a well ventilated and illuminated place. Use gloves and full cloths to protect the skin from toxic chemical effects.

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.