Project Management Theory & Practice Assignment

Project Management Theory & Practice - Assignment Example Therefore, in order to come up with successful, reliable and efficient projects, project managers are required to have a keen interest in managing quality of a project and shall also consider factors influencing quality of a project (Chen, 2010; Levy, 2011). This paper includes a discussion of how various factors influence the quality management process in a project management scenario and what different alternatives for managing quality and recommendations on how further improvements in quality of a project can be attained. Quality Control / Management – Definition Quality control or management can be defined as a process aimed at ensuring that a project which involves manufacturing a product or rendering of a service is able to a predefined and acceptable level of quality. The process of controlling or managing quality includes initiatives and steps taken by the responsible persons to verify and test whether the project is adhering to a certain predefined sets of quality ass urance standards (Levy, 2011; Lester, 2007). The Project Management Process The process of project management is a purely managerial activity which involves planning and managing activities related to a project. The traditional layout of a project management process comprises of various processes. These processes include the following: Initiation of Project Planning and Developing a Project Executing the Project Monitoring and Controlling the Project Closing Down the Project (Levy, 2011). Before going into the details of managing quality in projects, it is pertinent to mention here that the implementation and carrying out of a project involves two basic processes, which include technical process and management process (Levy, 2011). The technical process refers to a process which relates to the development of product. The technical process determines sub processes or activities for development of a product. The process outlines the cycle which is to be followed while carrying out a p roject and also identifies the activities involved in different phases of a project (Levy, 2011). On the other hand, management process refers to a process which relates to the whole project. This process determines the processes and ways in which all the activities involved in carrying out a project are planned, managed and controlled, such that each and every aspect of a project is considered and responsibilities and duties are allocated to relevant personnel and departments. The management process also takes into consideration the timely completion of a project and carrying out of all activities within the allocated budget (Levy, 2011). The interaction of technical process and management process is diagrammatically shown as follows: Source: (StaffTechs, 2013) As can be observed in the diagram presented above, the quality management process lies in the middle of technical process and management process and is regarded as a supporting process. This means that quality control and ma nagement actually bridges the technical and management processes and is interlinked with both of them. Quality Management Standards In order to satisfy the intended users or stakeholders of a project, it is important that the project meets their expectations and is able to provide them what it is

Whistle-Blowing. Interest in Public Administration, Policy and Ethical Essay

Whistle-Blowing. Interest in Public Administration, Policy and Ethical Analysis - Essay Example Politicians must, as a result, maintain equilibrium between information exposure and the preservation of the incentives of the bureaucrats in order to exert efforts. The tradeoffs can easily be explored with the help of a model of agency decision-making under partial information. It involves an employee's effort which determines a project's type, and a manager which opts whether to approve the project and regulate the employee. With the help of whistle-blowing, an employee unleashes the type to a politician, who may supersede the manager's decision. While whistle-blowing always increments the transmission of information, its influences on employee effort are dependent on the managerial preferences. A key finding states that stronger whistleblower securities reduce effort when the manager is aggressive and may commit more Type I faults than the politician would, however, would increase efforts otherwise. Whistleblower protections, therefore, definitely benefit the politicians if an ag ency is oriented to make Type II errors (Ting, 2006:2). Whistleblowers have chronologically played influential roles in passing critical information from lower gradations of the organizations to higher grade officials. An informal survey of American organizations in recent years delineates that this trend has not subsided. In the year 2002, the Federal Bureau of Investigation staff attorney Coleen Rowley went communal over the bureau's investigation of the suspected 9/11 accomplice Zacarias Moussaoui (Ting, 2006:2). Her account of the way FBI headquarters stifled attempts to examine his activities build assistance for the reorganization of its anti-terrorism attempts. Further, in the year 2004, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) researcher David Graham gave evidence before a Senate committee that the agency had paid no attention to the warnings about the heart disease menaces posed by Vioxx prior to its endorsement (Ting, 2006:2). Such exposures caused crucial destruction to the credibility of the FDA, thereby, generating the demand f or both the stricter drug approval processes and improvised the post-approval monitoring. Such incidents have not been confined to the public sector. In the year 2002, Sherron Watkins of Enron and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom gained acknowledgement for their roles in unleashing the managerial irregularities in their respective corporations (Ting, 2006:2). Instantaneous with its practice, whistle blowing has enjoyed both the political as well as legal protection. In the United States, the rudimentary securities were first enacted by the Continental Congress, and a centralized entity of the contemporary legal framework dates to 1863, when Congress passed the False Claims Act so as to combat the Civil War profiteers (Ting, 2006:2). The law enabled the citizenry to bring about a suit against an alleged offender on behalf of the government, thereby, sharing in a percentage of the damages awarded. In 1978, the Civil Service Reform Act criminalized the vengeance against the whistle blowers b y creating procedures for altering the terminations of their employment. The Whistle blower Protection Act or WPA of 1989 ensured confidentiality of the whistleblower