Project managers are usually faced with a barrage of quality issues once the construction work starts. Their approach to solving these problems has to be systematic and the method used should deliver the maximum impact.
An important Quality Control tool that comes into play is Pareto Charts that work on the Pareto principle or the law of the vital few and trivial many.
The principle is also known as the 80/20 Rule which states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
So the data collected regarding quality issues is compiled in a bar chart where the lengths of the bars represent frequency or cost are arranged with the longest bar on the left and the shortest to the right.
The Pareto Chart visually shows which situations are more significant. Simply put, Pareto’s law states that 20 % of the problems occur 80 % of the times, so if the Quality Control team focuses on only 20 % of those problems, the total number of issues are reduced by almost 80 %. So the idea is to compile and identify those 20 % of the issues that are giving maximum recurrence. And if the recurrence is prevented then the quality issue gets solved substantially. So Pareto charts are one very important tool as a QC tool.
