This post is copied from: http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/FeaturedBlogEntries/NoMoreQualityInitiatives.html
About 6 month’s back we [Microsoft Visual Studio Team System] hosted a meeting of our customer advisory council. This is a hand picked group of people who help to steer our product. They all know who they are, so I don’t need to name names. Many of them read this column regularly. Back then I was soliciting input for our “formal” methodology. During this session, one of our advisors urged me to avoid giving “us yet another quality initiative. We’ve tried them all and people are tired!”
And so, I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear me say, “Quality initiatives! Just say no!”
The problem with quality initiatives, and their champions, and their change agents, and their sponsors, and their improvement projects and their quality teams and process experts and black belts and green belts and funny handshakes and secret rituals and coded handbooks and group hugs and therapy sessions is quite simply that the improvements don’t last. When the black belt goes home, and everyone breathes out, the regular work force go back to their same old behavior.
QUALITY IS EVERYONE’S BUSINESS!
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT IS EVERYONE’S BUSINESS!
Plain and simple – quality and continuous improvement are everyone’s business. It’s an everyday thing for every employee. Everyone should understand variation and specifically understand how to measure and interpret the variation in their inputs, their rate of input, their working method, their lead time and their rate of output. Eliminating special cause variation should be everyone’s business, every day. Reducing common cause variation should be everyone’s business every day. Suggestions for improvement could come from anyone, any time and be implemented by a local consensus on the shop floor. No need for a central process improvement group or sanction from an ivory tower full of process priestesses.
That’s why in MSF for CMMI(R) Process Improvement, I’ve included daily standup meetings to surface issues and monitor and manage risks, eliminate special cause variation and make it everyone’s business to do so. That’s why we’re dropping conformance to plan and conformance to specification in favor of conformance to process and focus on variation reduction. That’s why we’re encouraging a bottom up, empowered team, consensus model. That allows decentralized decisions to be made quickly. The way to institutionalize continuous improvement across an organization is to make it everyone’s business, every day! The way to deliver an agile process which meets both the original spirit of the software CMM and the letter of the CMMI(R) appraisal model, is to distribute the quality responsibility at grass roots level across the whole organization. Everybody, every day allows quality and agility to walk hand in hand.
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