Abstract:
Wide-scale quality improvement initiatives are often launched for one of several reasons:
• A Service Level Agreement (SLA) with one or more strategic customers has consistently not been met due, in part, to immature quality processes
• An audit has revealed that a Line of Business’s cost of quality is not being adequately tracked, and cannot, therefore, be properly accounted for by management
• A newly hired I.T. executive is challenged to reduce the number of defects making their way into production, and suspects too great of an emphasis is being placed on time-to-market.

Indeed, the voice of the executive sponsor will spawn a process improvement initiative, in earnest. But, that voice alone won’t sustain it in the face of I.T. culture challenges. Frequently, competing process maturity efforts are already underway. The voice of the customer (VOC), be it internal or external, may very well say “I don’t want to pay for this.” Financial managers aren’t generally oriented toward recognizing which accounting factors relate to cost-of-quality (COQ). And, of course, no project manager relishes someone outside of his or her project team conducting quality gate reviews.

Implementing quality pervasively is both a vertical and horizontal endeavor. The vertical component is defined within Total Quality Management (TQM). The classic TQM concept calls for the establishment of quality objectives at the enterprise, line of business, department, and team levels. The horizontal component is addressed within SEI CMM. Processes, regardless of what activities they support, are rated in terms of how well defined and repeatable they are, in reality.

Presenter:
Jim Giddings