Do any of these warning signs sound familiar?
- Your projects regularly miss commitments
- Your project costs are spiraling out of sight
- Your project deliveries are late
- You always have last minute crunches to deliver the product
- Management has inadequate visibility into what is happening at the project level
- You have too many unforeseen surprises
- You have problems with product quality, customer complaints, and/or excessive rework
- Your products just do not function correctly
- Your organization has poor morale
- Your workers are burned out
- You have inadequate control over your project results
You can take heart in the fact that you do not have to face all of these monumental issues alone. In fact, there are many avenues open to you to help your organization solve these problems. However, the first step to a solution is to take a deep breath - and realize that all of these symptoms are caused by out of control processes.
In the software development and IT worlds, we have long recognized the importance of people, process, and technology and their associated impact on quality. That said, usually the process focus suffers within an organization.
Focusing on the process is important because it simply complements your focus on tools and technology. Many people wrongly think that if they just have the right tool, all of their problems will go away. However, a tool or technology by itself will most likely not be used effectively. In fact, you need to have a proper understanding of your work flow in order to make the best use of any tool or technology.
Additionally, a process focus also complements your people focus. You can strive to hire the best-qualified and most knowledgeable people in the industry, but experience and training are not always enough. You may think that working harder will help to bridge this gap, but putting forth more effort is not the answer. Instead, a well-defined and documented process can provide the means for working smarter, and not necessarily harder. Further, one of the side benefits of a documented process is that it tends to shift the “blame” for the problems that you are facing from the people performing the work to the process itself.
A long established premise in manufacturing dating back to Deming and Juran is that the quality of the system or product is highly influenced by the quality of the process used to acquire, develop, and maintain it. This well-known and understood premise is embedded in many of the international standards and quality movements in the manufacturing and service industries (e.g., ISO family of standards).
