Why Quality is everybody’s business

By Stephen Johnson - CEO and Founder, Roq

Imagine. You are at the start of a major programme. There is a buzz around the team as you know the outcome will be transformational for the business; the shareholders will be happy, meaning stability at board level; your company profit share will be in good shape; team morale will be at its best ever and you are finally getting some sleep after you eventually finished the last major programme (albeit 18 months late, and £4m over budget). 

Now, I know a lot of people will resonate with this. At the start of any programme of work, there is always a positive view. Everyone (and I am sure there may be an odd exception) involved wants to do a great job and deliver success.  But look at the latter parts of the final sentence of the previous paragraph “…eventually finished the last major programme (albeit 18 months late, and £4m over budget).”. 

The reality is, from my experience, a common theme for a lot of new initiatives is they immediately follow on from projects and programmes that haven’t gone to plan. In some cases, they have not gone in (£10m wasted), not met deadlines (£1.6m regulatory fine), overran by months, with expensive third parties overspend (£6.7m) as the icing. And the cherry – it isn’t actually that good – and there are loads of issues in production (£500k overtime in first 3 months for service desk). 

These are fictional numbers.  However, I ran a session with c20 CIO’s recently, and I put some equally shocking stats up regarding project failures, from the likes of McKinsey, who said, 17% of large IT projects go so badly, they threaten the very existence of the company and Al Lee-Bourke, Principal Consultant, Microsoft’s Adoption and Change Management Global Practice said “It has been said that 25% of tech projects fail outright,, 20% to 50% show no ROI, and up to 50% need massive reworking when finished.” 

Can you guess the reaction of the audience?... They thought the reality was worse! 

And this is a real business challenge.  I actually lose sleep at night figuring out how on earth I convince organisations, who are suffering / failing in these catastrophic ways, to spend relatively small amounts of money to prevent it all going so badly wrong. The irony isn’t lost on me. 

So, the conclusion is…. We are all tired! 

But how can we get over this?  I wanted to share some thoughts that might help a mindset shift, rather than some tactical tips that can be implemented.  As I stated earlier, I genuinely believe that at the outset of a programme of work, people want to do a good job – internal teams, suppliers, partners, stakeholders. The stats, however, don’t echo this.  

One of the challenges we see, and I have done for over 20 years, is that quality – the kitemark for it being deemed a real success – is often very subjective and has no clear owner. Therefore, at each stage of the cycle – regardless of delivery method – there are different views of what quality is, what it means and if it’s actually important. 

And therein lies a major problem - ownership

Without ownership, there is no accountability, and without accountability... you know the rest. So how about this for an idea? 

What if everyone involved in said programme was accountable for quality. What if everyone who you are sat with (virtual as well) on the kick off / inception sessions for any new programme of work had quality at the front of their minds.  

What if the direction of travel for the challenging questions was: how do we assure this is done well – when will we know, at the earliest point, it’s going wrong; how can quality issues be escalated; how we do instil each team with a sense that quality is key to this being a success? What did we learn from the last programme, that we absolutely have to avoid – and how do we identify this early if it starts to happen again?   

These are basic themes; it isn’t exhaustive. The idea is the narrative comes from a new perspective – from the top table – Exec sponsor, business owner, product/technology owner and strategic partners. All of them demonstrating a recognition for quality, all from the same place, being challenged on how to recognise it early, and how to support resolving it with the same gusto as an impending deadline. I suspect a subtle change like this could have tangible impact. But relatively small if its stayed within the “elite” group.  The real challenge is to start to embed it across the wider team. 

So imagine (lots of daydreaming going on in this article), the executive / senior committee are all bought in on quality. That is probably less than 2% of the people likely to be involved in delivering the work. How do you get the other 98% bought in? 

Well. There are 100’s of ways to do this, and that may be a book I write in a few years, so I won’t give all that away today. 

However, one of the things that resonates with a lot of people, is creating a climate of psychological safety for your team, across all levels. And what do I mean by that? 

Until AI takes over the world (I jest), then most organisations will be using humans to deliver complex technology – and in my experiences, humans are more complex than most technology stacks; but that is what makes us brilliant (boo to AI).  

However, with baked in that complexity is emotions and feelings. And with that comes resistance to change, to challenge, to create a ripple or even throw a grenade. But these are all traits that invariably hinder quality outcomes at work. If you multiply those nuances by the 150-200 people in your programme, then there is no wonder there are real technology disasters. 

So, my advice is create an environment where calling things out that aren’t going well is encouraged and even rewarded. It will take time, but the upside is huge, and it can be brought in on projects wherever they are in their lifecycle, not just new ones. It can start today. 

This is the climate change most organisation need. This is often evidenced by projects that are flagging green until about 2 days before a deadline and then you get the message that its going to be 6 months late (at best), 75% of scope, and an extra bill of £2.4m.   

Was that a bad day? Nope, that was a programme that was going pear shaped a long time ago, and the environment – commercial, process-wise or cultural – didn’t allow that to called out a lot sooner.   

Is that healthy for anyone? No. Business suffers, team get a rollocking, supplier gets booted out, sponsor doesn’t get the bonus……all in all, just not great. 

So as technology or business leaders, embarking on scaled change – then why not try it.  

Be brave enough to back the notion that the next one will be driven by measurable quality outcomes. Instil the principles from inception through to production, and encourage an environment, where raising something that can be fixed sooner, gets fixed, and start to identify route cause for continual improvement, not rollockings. And use the data captured as a catalyst for future investment – training, upskilling, additional headcount, better technology – and continue to iterate those improvements and changes to create a better working environment as well as better outcomes. 

My firm belief is that you will seriously improve your output over time, but as important the engagement of your team will be considerably higher. As a team member, why wouldn’t I love a place of work that allowed me to develop from making genuine mistakes and enabled me to challenge senior folk in a constructive way, for the benefit of the business. 

Quality is in my DNA, and its throughout Roq’s DNA. Why not embed it in the DNA of your organisation too… at least we can all get some sleep! 

As always, happy to chat through anything in the article.