House

If QA accepts a mantle to look at your project and tell you what is wrong with it (where it doesn’t meet it’s requirements, or more importantly where it doesn’t meet the customer’s expectations), then they are giving you a fish and you can have dinner tonight – cook it nicely, you may not ever get another. If QA instead identifies variations and deviations from expectations, and tells you what is wrong with the process such that these variation were allowed, then you will have dinner forever. By inspecting the process rather than the product, you are able to root cause the problem and increase throughput – by fixing the process, you eliminate the problem, not just identify it. In a portfolio organization, process problems most likely exist in multiple projects, not just where the problem is found. Each problem can be better viewed as a symptom rather than the disease. Cure the disease, save the patient.

Curing the disease is frequently hard. My daughter’s favorite TV show right now is one called House. It is about a curmudgeon of a Doctor who specializes in the really hard cases. Fascinatingly, every week someone comes into the hospital with seemingly obvious symptoms for a disease that is initially not cureable with the obvious solution. After several minutes of addressing the wrong problem, the antagonist (he is really the literary protagonist, but if you ask anyone, they will say he is far too antagonistic to be a protagonist) will do a hard restart and stop treating symptoms and start looking at the process of the disease. In that process, something invariably comes up that is the clue to cure the patient. Everyone but House is happy and next week, it all happens over again.

Root Causing the problem is tough. But often, finding the real problem is the only way to save the project and the process. As Mary said, use inspection to find the symptoms, and then perhaps Socratic methods to find the problems. Solve the process and you solve for the portfolio.

Living organisms are strange and complex systems. One of the mysteries about it that I always marvel at is their ability to heal themselves. When they are not able to do so perfectly, they do so sufficiently. They adapts. Where the adaptations are successful, they evolve.

Often times, when we come up against a constraint in our process, rather than eliminate it, we create an adaptation to work around it. If we don’t regularly evaluate our processes and hunt out these adaptations, they will evolve until they are so ingrained into our fabric that they can not be removed without dramatic and invasive surgery.