Challenges in building a world class quality organization

If the customer is important, Quality is also important. But in many organizations, the quality function is in the lower strata. Most of the time, the responsibility for this situation is with the quality department/function itself. Instead of playing a major, complementing role to Sales, Engineering and Management, they prefer the other route, resulting in isolation from the mainstream.

When one step into an organization as a leader for Quality Improvement, the challenges are manifold. The most important among them is creating a team of quality professionals with the ability to win, despite the obstacles on the way. A winning team, with a shared mission, focus and tremendous amount of perseverance and emotional quotient. Unfortunately, this aspect gets the least priority due to several reasons. It is very easy to get immersed in the day to day operations, and jump into the race without a proper team. What a disaster it can be!

It is very difficult to inherit an excellent team. Even if one is lucky to inherit one of the best teams, then gaining their acceptance as leader, and creation of a common mission is never a cake walk. It will never happen accidentally. One need to have clear strategy for achieving the above. One of increased production capability and high level of emotional deposits. Without a committed team, it is very difficult to implement the strategies for quality improvement, organization wide , irrespective of the brilliance of the strategies themselves. It is like attempting to cut the forest without a sharp axe.

Creating a winning team
Quality profession, by the very nature of it, is conceived as a fault finding job, without much creativity involved. Majority of the quality professionals are psyched to believe in this by their mentors (Quality without tears by Crosby). Hence, most of them, really don't know what can be their career path, in the long run. And nobody dares to show them the career path, because, in the conventional organizations, it is not very rosy (Have you ever heard of a quality professional becoming a CEO, very rare!, but all successful CEOs have believed in quality. So if we go by the definition of a quality professional as "One who takes initiative to improve the quality of processes and products in an organization", any one while performing the quality improvement function, is a Quality professional, hence there is no CEO who has not worked as a quality professional!!).

Lets have a look at the conventional career path and the skill sets requirement for each position, for two fresh engineers, who joins a conventional software company, one as a quality professional and the other as a programmer.

Capital letters indicate major skill sets

Look at that!. The skills required for a quality professional outweighs that of a software engineer. To understand this, objective analysis is required. If your organization is in the complex, high value, mission critical software development segment, this realization is very important for the organization’s long term success.

The main symptoms of an inefficient quality organization are

• Every one is worried. In their looks, talk and walk. There is no energy, to enthusiasm, no laughter, no direction.
• The quality professional’s face brightens only when the software fails (what an anomaly. Most often they fight, without even realizing that they are working for the same company!).
• The place of the quality function is low in the order of value addition to the organization, and it is evident from the management's actions.
• The brightest of the software guys never opt for Quality related job, their slot is Engineering.
• The rest of the organization treats them different. Most of the time, this is evident even in the managements approach.
• Are underpaid, than their peers with similar qualifications and experience who works as a programmer or a project manager.
• Can see self proclaimed specialists, doing the same monotonous, less effective operation years together, without any effort to improve anything, and with inertia to change.
• The quality professional, does not know, or does not want to know, or does not have the capability to understand the overall business perspective.

Root causes for this:

• From top management till the quality professionals, in a less matured organization, tends to think that, the job content of a quality professional involves only detection of bugs, if any. Hence the selection process of quality professionals are much more liberal, than for coders even when the demands of the quality professional’s job demands the best talent. So, the guy, who is desperate for a job, even when his heart is in coding, opts for testing and always looks backwards instead of looking forward.
• Most probably, the quality head will be less than a leader, who does not know how to think differently and more creatively. Hence lacks self confidence, due to lack of conviction. The focus gets narrow (CMM certification, ISO certification, Product release). Hence does not concentrate on the important- not urgent priorities for the Quality function.
• With the effect of the above two root causes, the team gets disillusioned and burnt out fast. This makes further progress difficult.
• Most of the quality professionals are fresh from the College, when they enter the quality profession, without much formal training in the quality fundamentals and software engineering. Hence they fail to understand the intricacies involved in the software engineering process. Hence lacks the ability to provide constructive feedbacks to the project teams and are capable of playing only the defect detection role. This leads to reduced respect from engineering teams.
• Majority of the quality professionals fail to realize the importance and scope of their jobs. It is much more than just test planning and testing. It is that of an internal consultants to the rest of the organization, that of a strategist and executioner of the strategies, of a coach, of researcher, of a test automator, of a bench marking specialist, of an analyst, of an advisor, of an evangelist of continuous improvement, of a designer, developer and implementor of world class quality management systems, of an external consultant to customers!! What an opportunity!! What a noble role!! Why are we not doing it then!!

Here lies the opportunity. The quality leader should have enough stamina, knowledge and charisma to initiate the following:

• Raise the expectation level of the team. Make them realize that, what they are doing is very important to the organization's and their long term success.
• Show them a great career path (If possible, convince the management of the idea of transforming QA into a line of business, once there are enough strengths within the function. This can open up a plethora of consulting opportunities for the Quality professionals, and additional revenue for the organization, resulting in WIN-WIN situations of all concerned)
• Share enough best practices from world class organizations with the team. Make them believe that it is possible to emulate/better those performances. Set world class performance standards.
• Reward continuous learning (This is needed for consulting. Have as many Masters, Doctorates. Since this takes longer time, the focus has to start from the early days)
• Promote innovation
• Focus on training
• Ensure that, quality is everybody’s business. Evangelize the role of everyone in the quality journey. Team up with top management to reiterate on the importance of quality for the organization, in as many ways and as many times as possible.
• Teach the team to focus on circle of influence instead of circle of concern (Teach all, the 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen covey)
• Rock the boat, let everyone come out of their comfort zones
• Insist on getting the best talent on board (With all these happening in the quality function, one can expect more aspirants from within the organization for the Quality professionals job)

And most important, do all these at the right pace and at the right time. The pace of this transformation should neither be too quick nor too slow. It should be the ideal phase, varies from organization to organization and from time to time. (When there is a recession in the US, hence a reduction in the delivery pressures, then go at maximum pace!). The timing is also very important. Excellent ideas can fail, because of bad timing for implementation (no point in proposing process improvement to a team, who are already struggling to meet the deadlines, they will surely reject it. The same team will cooperate, if the same idea is presented, after them meeting the deadline)

Start planting the seeds from the day one and walk the talk. This much is enough, to have a winning, ticking team. The rest of the journey is simple with the winning team. The approach is Inside-Out. It is Simple. It is within the circle of influence. The positive results of this, will result in the organization wide quality focus, where quality becomes everyone's priority. That’s what every one needs after all!!