Don't Assign Blame

Don't assign blame or point fingers when complaining about (ah hem, explaining) your delivery problems. It's all too easy to point the finger at someone elsewhere in the value chain and say, "I can't get my job done because _____ doesn't deliver _____ for me."

Eli Goldratt would prefer that we teach managers to express this in a less confrontational style using the language of variation and conformant quality. "I can't deliver to expectations because my inputs suffer from [this] excessive common cause variance and [these] specific special cause variances."

What Goldratt is effectively asking us to do is to plot each element in the value chain in relation to Wheeler's States of Control matrix. Hence, we might get explanations which look like, "I can't deliver an architecture with conformant quality expectations because my input, the requirements, exists in the Brink of Chaos State."

This concept asks us to define the notion of "conformant quality" at each step in the value chain. Remember, we get to choose the definition of "conformant quality". If we want to conform, we can always lower our standards. The agile movement requires us to do this. The industry standard for "success" when used in the context of "How many IT projects are successful?" is defined as "on-time, on-budget, with the required scope". The agile movement argues that there is always too much uncertainty in the scope for it to be brought under control. Hence, we should accept, the notion of "on-time and on-budget, with most of the scope" as the new standard for conformant quality.

How might it be possible to tighten up our definition of conformant quality and maintain that "on-time, on-budget with agreed scope" definition? Simple, as I pointed out, on Monday, reduce the batch size. With a smaller batch size, it is more likely that requirements will not change during the processing time and hence, the system will remain under control and delivering conformant quality. If we increase the batch size, the system moves out of control forcing us to lower our standards.