ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the quality control that lies at the heart of all control activities, called process control. It looks at the causes of variation in a process and discusses the methods commonly used to explain those variations. The methods used in quality control are based on simple graphs, charts, and diagrams; as such, they require very little analytical skill to construct, although the concepts underlying them are fairly rigorous. The primary objective of quality control in any organization, public or private, is to reduce the costs of its operation. Quality control deals with methods, tools, and approaches to diagnose the level of quality, or lack thereof, in a process. Although it is difficult to determine precisely what quality means for many of the goods and services a government provides, it is possible to identify specific areas of service operation where one could use control measures to assure quality.
