qualitasrebus

How many projects have you worked on where, before the project has even kicked off or, started sprinting, everyone from mid-level management to the developers, UX engineers , scrum masters. project managers and BA/SA and QA analysts are asking “who’s funding this?” It’s almost always followed by “If no one is funding this we shouldn’t or can’t work on it.” I applaud good project budget management embraced by a team. The timing and the audience is what concerns me. There appears to be a growing disconnect between understanding what is and isn’t a real program or project and it’s stalling team progress. I believe the problem can be solved by turning the budget planning over to the working team members. Managements role would be to mentor and guide the the ones who have to commit to the work on how to prepare a budget plan.

Avoid making a bad budget plan everyone’s problem by involving the resources who do the work (a development team for example) that can learn how to create a budget plan. They will manage to their own plan better than someone else’s. The team members involved should be capable of delivering quality work. There is no real gain in trickling down the inner working of the budget process to all of the working team members. You have to strike a balance while also not relying on your ‘gut’ too much.

What’s happening now?

Budgeting is done by only senior level management. The team members see a final budget number later after a list of new work is published.

Considering that the ability to estimate can be further eroded by policies that undermine the process of budgeting resource managers are trying to manage to, one could say that the accuracy workers hours of allocation in a budgeting tool are mostly intuition with a little luck thrown in.

There are a myriad of reasons as to why this is happening. Here’s a typical scenario in seven steps:

1)a senior manager has five team managers each with 5 employees

2)the sr. mgr. must ensure that all of his team managers are allocating all of their employees at 100% capacity.

3)since most projects cannot keep one person on them @100% allocation, the 5 team managers spread each employee across multiple projects with the goal of achieving 100% assigned to budgeted work.

4)fast forward to project planning – the scrum master takes the backlog and starts the sprint planning with the team.

5)the individual team members are asked to give their high level effort estimations for the tasks they are going to work on.

6)team members ask for a budget code to bill to which shows an allocation that was established with no prior knowledge of the work.

7)the project begins and the budget is now being tracked against numbers based on deploying resources to meet a 100% allocation requirement found nowhere in the effort based estimation of the work.

In this scenario, you can clearly see how the allocation of budget is completely disconnected from the effort estimated by the team members. Before your company ‘digs’ into effort estimation numbers and tries to make a one to one connection by tying it back to the budget there’s a couple of caveats you might want to share with them.

There is hope. Early planning by the team members that will be doing the work in collaboration with the budget planning process is a viable option to consider. In fact, it will build earlier commitment to a project since the team was a part of the actual budget estimation. The tools we have today can aid in the collaboration process. Currently, most companies do not leverage or include the right people, process or, the tools to achieve better budget planning results.

Think about quality programs (if any) where you work. It might not surprise you to find that the quality is looked down on or thought of as a nuisance by some management or, perhaps not thought of as a continuous process. For quite a few of you it’s more likely that quality is thought of as more of a given, or it can be found only your branding, or your slogan or is associated with a piece of technology or machinery! Did you ever wonder why this is? Very few companies know how or, have the tools to master the concepts or transform them into a working, sustainable model for success. By tools, I do not necessarily mean a software product or automation tools though, it doesn’t hurt to invest in these things. If you do decide to do this, consider reading my upcoming chapter  on putting people before process and tools first!

In the 1980’s the Ford Motor company advertised the quality was job 1. That was their slogan. However, if that’s all there was to it then this would be a “see what happens when you don’t commit to quality?” discussion about not following through which would essentially make this blog a rant – and it is not that at all.

Ford did make quality job 1 and by the time Harold “Red” Poling (the CEO who made quality a priority) retired Ford had 5 of the top 10 best-selling, highest quality rated cars in the US.  What’s important to note here is that the road to quality was not the easy road to take. It included the closing of 8 plants, and reducing the automobile line up. It meant that a car with quality issues would not be sold to the public until all of the issues were resolved. Ford paid close attention to the details that mattered to their customers and it won their loyalty back and they went from burning $2bn a year in 1980 to profitable by 1983.

With the quality programs implemented Ford not only emphasized cost reduction and flexibility but also ergonomics. The improvement of the working environment (Maloney, 1994; Witt, 1995) made a difference in ways beyond the obvious ways one could easily guess. Ford workers not only suffered less fatigue they had higher morale. It change their attitude towards their work! So, improvements in the quality of physical comfort and work environment boosted morale. The kind of reenergized mindset that leaves your employees wanting to make great products for you. So, let’s put a new twist on the  belief that corporations are people. If corporations are people then Ford is the kind of person you want as an employer and a friend. Feeling good about the inner circle of friends you keep can go a long way.

Walk around a company where the morale is low and I guarantee the products or service they are putting into the marketplace are lower quality than the workplace with high employee morale. In fact, many investment firms send their top stock picking portfolio analysts to do exactly that. If you have ever watched Bloomberg TV you will hear one or more mentions to this in interviews about a company’s potential and products and whether or they are good investment or not.

“Our data show that customers who are highly satisfied remain loyal,” says
Louise Goeser, Ford’s vice president of quality. “In fact, one and a half points
of customer satisfaction drive about one point more loyalty. In North America
alone, this translates into more than $2 billion in incremental revenue and
roughly $100 million in profit.”

Today, quality at Ford continues to be rated highly for quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty with its cutomers and high company morale. They’ve managed to remain adaptive and responsive while executing their quality initiatives because they have mastered the ability to break up complex issues through direct and oblique responses and initiatives into uncomplicated, solvable actions items. Some of these actions had immediate payoff and others are paying back dividends over time. Ford understood they needed both.

Where does you company stand with regards to the necessity of quality? If you asked that question to your manager and then asked “Can you show me how we measure quality?” or,  “Can you show me an instance when we stopped a development project to address quality concerns?” what was the answer? If it was something like “Oh, we have 3 pre-prod environments, a DR and a prod-fix environment to cover all kinds of quality issues”  in fact, any sentence that has the word “quality” followed by the word “issues” should be a big billowy red flag. There’s a good chance your company has made quality an assumption.

Even the ones who embrace quality sometimes falter. Ford’s lesson is a continuous one. They continue to learn how to improve and adapt as they go. The point is, not only does Ford recognize they will never be done improving they also know that anything they had done well is fair game to be criticized , torn down and rebuilt if it means better quality.

An assumptive statement to the effect of “quality is gift that we the employer demand instantaneous receipt of, because we have hired the smartest people and bought the most expensive tools” should neither be stated directly or implied in any business vision statement or, in any employees contract of employment. Everyone at Ford from the owners to the line managers knows they have to bring out the best in their people first before anyone delivers the level of quality that improves the processes that directly and indirectly improve the products that impact the bottom line. A committment to quality is necessary, real and lasting.