What is quality? The basic problem anywhere is quality. What is quality? A product or service possesses quality if it helps somebody and enjoys a good and sustainable market. Trade depends on quality.
- Dr. W.E. Deming. The New Economics, 3rd ed. (p. 2)
Triangle of Interaction. Neither the building of a product nor tests thereof in the laboratory and on the proving ground are sufficient to describe its quality and how it will perform or be accepted . Quality must be measured by the interaction between three participants: (1) the product itself; (2) the user and how he uses the product, how he installs it, how he takes care of it (example: customer permitted dirt to fall into roller bearing), what he was led (as by advertising) to expect; (3) instructions for use, training of customer and training of repairman, service provided for repairs, availability of parts. The top vertex of the triangle does not by itself determine quality. I am reminded of an old Japanese poem:
Kane ga naru kay ya
Shumoku ga nara ka
Kane to shumoku no ai ga naruIs it the bell that rings,
Is it the hammer that rings,
Or is it the meeting of the two that rings?- Dr. W.E. Deming, Out of the Crisis, (pp. 175-176)
Where is quality made? The answer is, in the top management. The quality of output of a company can not be better than the quality directed at the top.
The people in plants and in service organizations can only produce at best the design of product and service prescribed and designed by management.
Job security and jobs are dependent on management’s foresight to design product and service that will entice customers and build a market.
- Dr. W.E. Deming, as quoted in Orsini, Joyce. The Essential Deming. (p. 69)
WHEN I teach Dr. Deming’s philosophy to managers, very early on I pose a question to them to define quality from their own perspective and that of their customer. It proves to be a tricky exercise that generates a lot of discussion and debate, with almost as many definitions as managers, which suggests a possible root of many problems. When I ask who is responsible for quality, I often get the predictable response “all of us”, meaning them and their employees, but when pressed further few make the connection all the way to the top.
I’ve found it useful to introduce a different perspective that I learned from a talk that Dr. Bill Bellows, a former Deputy Director of the Deming Institute, delivered a few years ago where he spoke on “minding gaps” in an organization’s interactions and how they translate into a product or service: Quality can be thought of as the product of the answers to two questions, and may applied to product, service, or people in an organization: How well do the components or parts fit together? How well do they work together?
As Bill is fond of saying in talks, a 747 is more than just a collection of parts flying in close formation. The quality of the aircraft depends on how well the thousands of parts fit together and work together over time, which corresponds directly to the interactions and interrelationships between the people who make and assemble them, and their organizational systems.
Example
In software development, we have an analog known as Conway’s Law which states that organizations often design systems that mirror their own communication or interaction structures. It is named after Melvin Conway, who first described the phenomenon in his 1968 Datamation essay, How Do Committees Invent?
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations… a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.
This criterion creates problems because the need to communicate at any time depends on the system concept in effect at that time. Because the design which occurs first is almost never the best possible, the prevailing system concept may need to change. Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design.
Unfortunately, a few years later an IEEE engineer by the name of Winston Royce would release a paper detailing how to respond to Department of Defense contract bids using a staged/phased approach that became widely misinterpreted and taught for over forty years, guaranteeing poor quality by throwing most of Conway’s wisdom out the window. This would persist until an unlikely group of seventeen “lightweight” software development system practitioners gathered one February weekend in Snowbird, UT in 2001 to lay down the four values and twelve principles for higher quality software that would come to be known as the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. In my opinion, the influences of systems thinking permeates the document, and is evidenced in the first value: Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools.
In the intervening twenty years since the Agile Manifesto was written, multiple frameworks for higher quality software delivery have been spawned such as Scrum, Kanban, and Lean. However, despite this success the containing systems software teams work within have remained mostly static with the same structures and features of the past one hundred years. The revolution stopped at management’s door. Result? Quality is still an ongoing concern because of limitations imposed by the prevailing practices of management.
Reflection Questions
Consider Dr. Deming’s thoughts on quality above and compare and contrast from your own perspectives, that of your organization, and your customer. How well aligned are the participants in your system for quality of product or service? How well do the parts of your product or service fit together? How well do they work together? What “gaps” do you perceive between people, teams, departments, divisions, vendors, or suppliers? How do they contribute to quality? How can these gaps be narrowed or closed? By what method?
Extra Credit Reading
For a deeper-dive into how to design better interactions to improve quality of software, check out Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais’ book, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology for Fast Flow. Both credit Deming as a key influence in their work.