Management of Quality Quantity and Speed

Dr. K M Soni, Superintending Engineer CPWD, Bhopal

Management is the need of today. Management has been included in various specialised fields now like environment, tourism, hotel, information technology etc. apart from traditional courses like finance, human resource, operation and marketing. In the management concept, management sets the goals based on quantities for individuals and performance appraisal is made on the achievements. So the quantity plays a very important role in the assessment of the appraisal of an employee. On the other hand when we talk about the quality, it is the customer or the client who makes the assessment. And if the customer is not satisfied with the quality, it also goes against the employee and the employee's appraisal gets affected so much that the employee may be shown the door. Therefore, the question arises which one to choose – quality or quantity?

And then there is speed which is closely related to quality and quantity both. Many experts say choose two out of three as one can't have all three unless he/she is Mr/Ms Extraordinary or Mr/Ms impossible. In actual situations there may be three probabilities as detailed below:

1. High quantity and high quality but low speed. Like if one is a designer or planner, or even in supervision, high level of quantity and professionalism may be possible only if he/she get sufficient time to do so resulting into slow speed.
2. Low quantity of work at high level of quality produced at a faster speed.
3. High quantity of work at low quality provided at a fast speed.

In a civil engineering project this becomes further difficult as process uniformity is difficult to achieve due to manual construction in many items. Therefore, an engineer has to maintain a balance in all three even if he/she is not able to achieve all three at a time and here are his/her managerial capabilities which are important to deal with the situations.