Remember These Ten Costs of Poor Quality

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Quality SolutionsQuality Management

A quality solution costs money and time to build. You may think skipping several quality management steps costs less, however, ultimately it costs much more. Learn to recognize that poor quality adds cost.  Though not be apparent as the project progresses, these costs must be considered as part of the full-life cycle cost of the delivered solution.

Examples of Poor Quality

Examples of the cost of poor quality include:

  1. Rework proves that your quality management and administrative processes require more rigorous beginnings. The best example of rework is repairing deliverables you thought were already complete and correct.
  2. Bad decisions, based on poor or misleading information, cause errors and long-term consequences in your solutions.
  3. Troubleshooting takes time to investigate and determine the cause of errors and defects occurring throughout the project.
  4. Poor morale due to poor quality solutions illustrates that employees don’t like working on poorly planned projects. In addition, increased absenteeism, high-rate turnover, and lack of productivity emerge as morale decreases.
  5. Warranty work is performed on a product or application free or at a reduced price. Therefore, if your project produces a product with lower quality, warranty claims rise, and you lose money.
  6. Repairs/maintenance after a poor quality solution goes live causes more work with higher repair and maintenance costs.
  7. Client dissatisfaction caused by a poor quality solution never return. Consequently, poor quality internal projects cause clients to refuse to work with project managers and team members on subsequent projects.
  8. Help desk sometimes causes users problems with project solutions or understanding how to utilize the solutions. Therefore, a help desk service requires much effort and maintenance costs.
  9. Support staff requires effort and cost to maintain a solution because of problems, errors, questions, etc.
  10. Mistrust develops when a project team or organization delivers poor quality products. The client begins to believe the project organization cannot produce a good product.  This leads to a mistrust of project team skills, processes, and motivation.

Quality Management

While quality management costs, delivering poor quality costs, also. A key point of formal quality management suggests that you spend quality time on internal quality management (prevention and inspection). You save substantially on internal and external failure costs. Spend more time focusing on a better product. The cost of operating the product long-term may be dramatically reduced.

For more information about managing your Quality Management System, contact Don Swift at 940-228-0550.