PPC has always strived to maintain a corporate-wide commitment to quality and industry best practices. Our company was founded 13 years ago on the principle that outstanding performance is critical to project completion. Thus our name: Project Performance Corporation. Since 1991, PPC has maintained continual growth (over 18% per year), and today we are considered one of the fastest growing small businesses in the Washington area (as recognized by Inc. 500 Magazine and the Washington Business Journal). We currently manage over 100 contracts, comprising more than 400 work assignments with approximately 4,000 sub-tasks. However, as we have added clients, contracts, and employees over the years, PPC has been faced with the increasingly difficult task of ensuring that each of our projects is performed with the commitment to excellence upon which our company was originally founded. And, that our efforts were ultimately maximizing client satisfaction.

In response to this increasing difficulty, PPC implemented a Quality Improvement Program (QIP) in 2003 to help promote our commitment to outstanding project performance within the organization. As shown in Exhibit 1, PPC has established the QIP as its foundation for ensuring that we deliver high quality services and solutions to satisfy our clients.

The QIP has two basic missions:

1. To implement and maintain a standard project process for every PPC project that will guarantee timely, cost-effective solutions.

2. To implement and maintain a corporate-wide Quality Assurance & Control Program to ensure compliance with the management process and guarantee consistently high quality performance on every project.

As a first step in achieving its mission, the QIP developed, refined, and formalized corporate processes for project management and quality assurance. The QIP then rolled these processes out to a subset of projects in our Information Technology (IT) Solutions Sector. To validate their completeness and potential for maximizing client satisfaction, we sought independent appraisals of our corporate processes in 2004 from two industry-leading organizations:

• Software Engineering Institute - under Level 2 Maturity of their Capability Maturity Model Integrated - CMMI.
• International Organization for Standardization - under their ISO 9000:2000 standards for Quality Management Systems.

We successfully met, and in many cases exceeded, the rigorous requirements of both appraisals. Yet, this was just the first step in achieving our larger goal of ensuring outstanding project performance leading to client satisfaction. With a corporate vision and strategy for significant growth in the coming years, PPC executive management has made it clear that there is not an internal initiative of greater importance than the QIP. Moving forward, we look to strengthen our management and quality assurance processes and work to implement them across all PPC projects.


CONTACT INFORMATION
Brian Creswick
Project Performance Corporation
(703) 920-0033
bcreswick@ppc.com