Outline of a quality plan for industrial research and development projects

Quality issues associated with projects in an industrial research laboratory are analyzed. By recognizing the common characteristics of projects in an industrial research laboratory, the problem of identifying the quality priorities is broken down into a series of levels. For each project at the top level are the personnel who play important roles for the success or failure of the project. At the second level are the stages through which the project progresses during its successful completion. At the third level are the factors contributing to the successful completion of the stages above. At the fourth level are the subfactors or the quality metrics that identify the level of success of the factors above. Through the application of this analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a planning and decision-making tool, the quality plan is constructed, and activities of industrial research projects are brought under a common umbrella to identify the most important quality aspects of customers. The scoring mechanism developed here is useful for quality monitoring purposes. It is noted that the way a quality plan is structured can be especially useful for computerizing activities in order to monitor the progress of a large number of projects