Project Management & Software engineering: the 'cost of non-quality'
I had an interesting conversation today: a friend of mine, who works as a software developer in Paris, told me that although the application he is working on didn’t quite work perfectly yet, his boss wanted to release it, i.e. integrate my friend’s application into the ERP of their client ASAP. The application is ready, but it hasn’t gone through the whole quality checking pipeline. According to the boss, the reason why the application should be integrated is that “a one-year old planning said so”. Allright, but the project was postponed by 2 months in between…So, since the application still needs two more weeks of testing (outsourced), my friend is on time with developing his software.
Trying to give some advice, I asked my friend to prepare a small document about the cost of non-quality, and try to convince his boss, using to the actual document, that non-quality is one of the worth things in any project. Imagine the software works perfectly: fine, perfect. And altough the IT services company my friend works for would’ve taken a risk, nobody would notice.
But then, and this is far from unlikely, imagine my friend’s application has a bug or worse, provokes a crash of their client’ system. Not only both my friend and his boss would lose their jobs, they might also lose a key account (the client is a major international bank), a project audit team would come on board, another software developer would be hired to dive into the code, find its shortcomings, and send it for a thorough (and costly since it’s outsourced) quality checking. All in all, the client would’ve to pay for a second integration. Nobody would be happy, that would be a disaster: a lose-lose deal.
Bottom line: I suggested to my friend that he didn’t accept, under any condition, to release his piece of software before the quality checking process is over, but also that he changes boss as soon as he can. His company’s reputation + his client’s business + himself are worth much more than his boss’s ego.
LikeRelated posts:
- Software engineering: from the traditional V cycle to eXtreme programming
- 7 good software project management videocasts
- A review of a great Project Management Institute lecture on industrial outsourcing and agile software development offshoring
- Risk Sharing Partnerships, solutioning offshore quality issues?
- Enterprise software sales materials briefing
.NET (C#), Business Process Management, CIO, CRM, Consulting, ERP, Europe, Friends, MNC, Organization, Outsourcing, Security, Software, operations
The cost of non-quality can be quite big. There’s a really recent example I heard, where this one IT consultancy had done this client’s customer-facing system, which had some problems causing real financial losses and affected reputation of the client severely.
The result? No new business to this IT consultancy from this company.
That’s exactly where my friend’s boss could lead both his company and client. I didn’t know about the story you’re mentionning, but I’m not surprised it occurs sometimes. Since we’re aware of the concept of ‘non-quality cost’, we should evangelize and communicate more around it. Risk management is key to a project’ success.
[...] – it suffers many bugs (there is one and just one delivery date) and the cost of non-quality’s pretty high. [...]
Dear sir,
I will ask you to delete our company logo from your weblog because our company has nothing to do with your conversation on ‘the cost of non-quality’. You use our logo without making contact with us before to ask permission for this.
Counting on your co-operation,
Gunter Fasoel
Managing Partner
Done.
Indeed Quality Software has nothing to do with ‘the cost of non-quality’. It just happened that, looking for a picture with written ‘quality’ on it, I felt blessed to have both keywords ‘quality’ and ’software’ appear when looking for a picture on Google images.
I apologize for any inconvenience caused and wish Quality Software, both the company itself and quality software in general, all the best.
Jeremy