The Mindset

Here’s a rhetorical poll: How many times have you heard (or said) one or more of the following sentences:

• Time to market is more important to us than quality.
• Our customers don’t care about quality. They just want the product delivered as soon as possible.
• We have to settle for “good enough quality” because we don’t have enough resources.
• Quality is important, but we don’t have time for that right now.
• Why should we bother with all this quality stuff? We are doing just fine as it is. Aren’t we…?
• We can’t do everything by the book! This is the real world!

If none of these sentences sounds familiar, you might be one of those lucky people working for a company with a strong and healthy sense of quality. Alternatively, you might be working for a company in which no one even considers raising the issue of quality.

Arguments as those listed above are derived from a common misunderstanding regarding what quality is.

Quality is not about doing things by the book. It is not only about making your customers satisfied (although this is of course an important part of it). Quality is not about reducing the number of bugs. It is not about writing formal documents, nor is it about complying with a certain standard or receiving a certain certification.

Quality is about maximizing the benefit from the products you create while minimizing the costs of production. When you adopt this definition of quality, you can’t possibly say “I don’t have money for that!” – Quality is about saving you money and enabling you to make more money. You can’t argue that “Time to market is more important” - If time to market is important to your business, it should be considered in the quality equation.

There is one pitfall, however, in which many organizations fall when talking about quality. You must be careful not to make a shortsighted analysis of the equation. Quality is a strategy, and strategy is always a long-term concept. You have to consider a wide variety of aspects and forces as part of this equation, and aim for the long run.

In order to correctly use the quality formula you have to do two things. The first is to look beyond your next move. When I talk about maximizing the benefit from the products you create and minimizing production costs you must aim for the long term. You cannot establish a business strategy on short-term decisions and no long-term vision. Shipping flawed products due to time-to-market considerations, for example, might not be the best move for the long run. Your reputation might be damaged, your customer service costs will get higher, and customers might ditch you. You have to consider these factors for your business to survive. Doing what seems to be the correct short-term move might seriously damage your business.

The second thing you must do is always keep your finger on the pulse. You have to constantly evaluate the two sides of the equation because the environment you operate in is dynamic.

The same line of thinking should be applied to designing the product, conduting various reviews, configuration management, project planning, test automation, but also to the satisfaction of your employees, the stress they are under, their working conditions and their ability to improve themesleves and take pride in what they do. 

Resources, schedule, desired feature-set, customer’s satisfaction, employees’ satisfaction, are all important aspects in your business. Quality is balancing all these aspects (and many more) to create the optimal solution for your business for the long run.