Introducing Project Management with Quality

The president of my company likes to use the word "pushing the envelope" a lot.  He wants to push the envelope with some ingredient ratios in our products to improve quality. 

We very quickly realized this meant a lot of r&d & change for production, sales, printing, nutritional labels, SOPs, standards and references, cost, testing, shipping, maintenance, and labor.  As someone who knows just enough about the PMBOK to get myself into serious trouble, this sounds like a PROJECT to me.  My company is not a project based organization, nor do any of the management seem to have a basic understanding of planning. 

We scheduled a call to discuss the issue, in which I thought we would set goals and measurements.  Instead our meeting was a scattered mess of when to involve whom and whose department was a priority.  It ended with my boss asking for this "plan" I spoke of by mid next week. 

I'm struggling to introduce change management as no department seems to realize the other department is affected by things they do.  My question is - how far do I go?  Proposal?  Rough Schedule? Gnatt chart? 

I could plan for days, baby, but a few days are all I got to make a plan.  Do I kiss them on the cheek or punch them in the face?  Inner QA makes me want to delve into hundreds of steps and related processes to make this a flagship project that won't fail, but practical adult me realizes a LOT of projects fail, and upper management might not take to kindly to risks happening, which means I would have to spend a lot of time on risk management.

Suggestions?

^{I would do an outline plan, and in this plan I would document who and what gets affected by any changes.}

^{Do it by department; everyone will be affected from Sales & Marketing to HR (training all these people in the new documents etc). Someone halso as to make all these document changes}

^{Include write off of current packaging (would it have to be a witnessed destruction?) ; cost for new artwork, Time scales}

^{I could go on and on.}

^{I'd even allocate (name) people from each department who you think should be involved. To make sure it never happens, make your president the project manager!}

^Cazx

 ^{To make sure it never happens, make your president the project manager!}

 

^Cazx

:roflmao: !  During the meeting, I said " Someone has to manage and plan these changes", and he said "Well do it, I'm not going to manage what you do out there. Good meeting. "Majors" will give us the plan mid week" .   We were on conference phone, but I imagine his hand and face gestures were akin to this - :bird:

Thanks. I'll start with project team / resources needed & a general outline with risks and milestones.  They obviously have no idea what project management is (which is okay, but frustrating), and I don't want to overwhelm them or over promise & disappoint. Although it is a simple project, I'm also afraid of failure poisoning them against future changes being addressed as projects. Frankly, I want to put an operator on the project team and I think that would freak out management.

Never ceases to amaze me how "Quality" is usually the project manager.  But it does make sense as all too often we are "change agents".  Adding operators can be a wonderful idea as they often have powerful insights and too often  they are not included enough. 

:off_topic:  I love your new avatar!.