Case - Quality Management Case Study Assignment - Toyota/Healthcare.gov

You have your choice of two scenarios:

1 . Once upon a time, Toyota used to be known for its quality. It was (and still is) famous for its Toyota Production System (TPS) which, among other things, used Japanese / Deming style quality management processes.

2. Consider the initial Healthcare.gov Web site and information system that went public on 1.October.2013, but that was so poorly designed and tested that essentially nobody could use it. Additionally, it had significant privacy and security issues.

However, as everyone is now familiar with, they both had serious quality issues. Toyota in 2009-2010 recalled millions of vehicles and stopped production entirely for several months while they used problem-solving techniques to diagnose and remedy their quality problems due to crashes and fatalities. The Healthcare.gov Web site was essentially inoperable and few people could use the site to sign up for health insurance.

What happened and how does it relate to project quality?

Assignment

Do a brief case study of Toyota's or the Healthcare.gov Web site's quality situation.

This is an individual project, not a group / team project. Do your own work.

There is a plethora of information available about this online. Use an ILS library database search and a Web search to find relevant material. You may also do physical bricks-and-mortar library research if you wish. (Make sure to properly quote, cite, and reference any material that you use. Make sure that your paper itself is written in your own words.)

This is intended to be a short case study not an extensive research paper. With so much information available, it would be easy to spend too much time on researching this and/or writing it up. Please don't do that. The important thing is to find and summarize Toyota's /Healthcare.gov's quality problems and their approach to the problem. Additionally, please do not digress into political issues. While they may or may not be relevant, this is not a political science course, but an IT project management course, so please concentrate on the IT project quality management issues.

If possible, use quality management techniques discussed in the textbook to both explain Toyota's or Healthcare.gov's quality management processes and to discover, define, and analyze the problems they had with quality.

Explain what went wrong, how Toyota or the Healthcare.gov team discovered the problems, what they did about it, and how it relates to project quality considerations.

Note: If you elect to study the Healthcare.gov Web site, then please understand that the case is that of the Web site and the information system behind it. The case is not about the Affordable Care Act itself nor is the case about the politics of it. This is not a class in government and politics. So limit your focus to the risk, quality, and project management of the technical Web site and information system, not on health care financing and not on politics.

Approach and Content

There are many different kinds and purposes of case study (from marketing to business management to scientific research), each of which have their own approaches and formats. If you are familiar with a case study approach or format that is an appropriate fit for this case, you may use it. However, please do not attempt to shoehorn this case into an inappropriate approach or format. If you are not familiar with an appropriate approach, let me suggest the following, based on a variant of the Formal Systems Approach:

1. What is the apparent problem/issue? That is, what were the quality issues their customers were experiencing?

2. What are the facts?

a. Background: What was Toyota's production process (TPS - Toyota Production System) and what was its quality process? Alternatively, what were the Healthcare.gov team's development processes and quality processes?

b. How did Toyota or Healthcare.gov go about investigating its quality issues?

3. What is the real problem? What did Toyota, Healthcare.gov, and others find upon investigation?

a. What were the actual quality issues with their products or systems?
b. What were the problems with their quality management processes?
c. Were the problems in-house problems, or were they problems with their suppliers or subcontractors, or were they at both levels? Explain.

4. What did Toyota / Healthcare.gov do about it?

a. What changes did they make in their quality management processes?
b. What changes did they make in their public relations and marketing to address the issue?
c. Beyond their own findings, what, if anything, would you recommend that they should have done differently and/or that they should do differently in the future?

5. What was the outcome?

a. As nearly as you can determine from your research, were the changes successful? Did they restore (or exceed) previous quality levels?
b. What is the public's reaction? Is the public convinced that Toyota products or the Healthcare.gov system now are safe and of high quality?

6. Lessons learned:

a. What lessons (e.g., primarily about quality, but if relevant, also about production, marketing, customer relations, etc) can you derive and abstract from this that would be of general use in project management and project quality issues?
b. To what extent is an organization responsible for its suppliers' or subcontractors' problems? Where does the "buck" (the blame, the responsibility) stop?