Project quality management principles and practices

¶ … Quality Management Case

The Executive Information System (EIS) offered the medical instrument company a significant advantage in regards to information technology. It states that management loved the way that the user friendly interface allowed them to track sales of various medical instruments quickly and easily by product, country, hospital, and sales representative. However, several quality issues were eventually found within the EIS system such as problems with the Web-based system, inaccurate reporting, and the systems overall reliability. The system would crash a couple times a month and many users noted that the system was steadily getting slower. Therefore the company decided to hire an external consultant to identify and correct the system's flaws.

The first step the consultant, Scott Daniels, did was to form a quality team and begin to research the issues associated with the EIS. This included a cause and effect diagram as well as a Pareto chart. They found that many of the users had insufficient software skills and that there was virtually no training provided to them upon the adoption of the EIS. Scott was unable to find anything that was majorly wrong with the system except from the fact that the users did not receive adequate training. Therefore the initial investigation concluded that there was nothing significant wrong with the actual system but the users needed to undergo training to learn how to better use the system.

Training is often one of the most overlooked sources of project issues. It is likely that the original project team should have conducted some kind of formal training to ensure that the end users were comfortable with the program. The team could have used a phased roll out approach to train the management in small groups of managers who are of the same skill set. One advantage of the phased roll out approach is that it will allow ample time for training users for their specific needs. Since each manager will likely have a different skill level and experience with various systems, each individual training session may require varying levels of training to teach the users how to effectively use the new system. Another possibility would be to create user or training documentation that is based on the unique system so that they can problem solve on their own if they are having issues.