Customer Reviews

Project Quality Management: Why, What and How

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Kenneth H. Rose, PMP, has provided the project management world with a great book, Project Quality Management: Why, What and How. When I review books I read the material with a few principles in mind, including Technical Accuracy, Usefulness, Clarity, Concise, and Importance of the material. This book meets or exceeds these principles.

The book is set up in four sections: Quality Foundations, Quality Management, Tools for Managing Project Quality, and Quality in Practice. Starting with Quality Foundations, Kenneth takes the reader through definitions, the history of the quality movement, and introduces the pioneers of Quality. This section is presented in a technically accurate, clear and concise manner. The material gives the reader an understanding without being too deep to be boring or over done.

In the second section, Quality Management, Kenneth starts introducing the elements of the PMBOK, PMI's Project Management Book of Knowledge, the book most project managers use to plan & execute projects. To assist in using the tools, beginning in this section, Kenneth provides a case study in the Appendix that the reader uses to apply the information. The liberal use of illustrations, charts and graphs adds to the understanding of the material, and continues the accurate, clear and concise way the entire book is written. This section will be interesting to project managers not familiar with the PMBOK and the tools they may not be aware exist.

Starting in the final chapter of the Quality Management section and through the third section, Tools for Managing Project Quality, Kenneth introduces a detailed description and use of the tools of quality supplied by the pioneers of Quality as it relates to project work. In this section the information from the previous two sections is brought together very clearly to assist in actual use.

In the final section, Quality in Practice, W. Edward Deming's (one of those pioneers) Red Bead experiment is presented. The experiment is presented as a practical experiment for your team to use to confirm their new or increased knowledge before applying it to a real project. Side note: sounds like a great team building exercise.

As for the importance of the text, absolutely! It is the only book I know of written for the project management community about Project Quality Management with the PMBOK interwoven. This book could be used as a training tool or reference tool for students, novice or veteran project managers.

Books on project quality are often narrowly focused - on Six Sigma, software testing, or statistical process control, for example. For anyone trying to apply the Project Management Institute's quality approach (admittedly rather limited) to a project, without getting bogged down in test scripts, the lack of a good, general-purpose project quality book has been a problem.

This book addresses the gap between domain-specific quality processes and general project quality. After providing an overview of the quality movement and key definitions of quality, the book outlines a step-by-step process for quality planning, quality assurance and quality control. The steps are specific enough to provide a quality framework, while remaining general enough that any tools an organization currently has can be slotted into that framework.

Two tools from the book that I particularly like:
1. The Wheel of Quality, which illustrates the different elements of a quality system and their interrelationships.
2. The L-shaped matrix, which can be used to prioritize customers and requirements.

I have read a lot of project management books. Some good. Some bad. This one falls a few notches above "good"--somewhere in the "excellent" to "great" range. I have not, to date, seen such a comprehensive, practical guide to project quality management. There are lots of quality management books out there. The problem is that not many of them have a focus on PROJECTS. This book fills the gap. Great discussion, great examples, great practical guidance for how to actually implement quality on projects. I keep this book on my bookshelf as a good, practical reference.

When I bought this book I never thought it was not going to accomplish its goal. Quality is something that varies form one person to the next but I have to admit that its author scored big on this one. If you are introducing yourself into the world of Project Management and Quality, this is the book for you.

I've used Rose's book in my Quality Mmgt book now for two years. It's understandable, actionable and concise. The students consitently rate it very highly in end of session evaluations.

We used this book as an addition to the text book for our graduate program at BU. I found the book an easy read which I wanted to continue on. It is not volumous either. You can finish each chapter in one sitting.

This book does a very good job explaining the tools needed for statistical process control and how it applies to project management.

If you are looking for quality techniques based on W. Edwards Deming's teachings, then this book is a very good read.

This book lives up to its title. You will not be disappointed.

This book is the best one I could find in Project Quality Management, but it is an overview, still. It also put together Quality on Project Processes with Quality on Project's End Products. I would like to see these two concepts separately with focus on the Quality on Project's End Products.
There is an interesting introduction to the Compliance Matrix method for tracking project requirements and this is something to be studied on project quality management.
The book helps a lot, but whoever reads it will need further studies and practice to understand Project Quality Management. The big problem is that there isn't many books that really explain Project Quality Management and this one is the Best I could find.