Quality is a Team Sport
There is a good chance that those who follow team sports closely would be able to name at least one team that actually got worse after hiring a star player. If they have trouble, they might be able to name at least one team that looks fantastic on paper but just can’t quite deliver. If we looked at these teams closely we would find that root cause of their inability to perform is an inability to behave as a team. We can see it on the field as they play. Each person seems to be acting independently. Each player has their own goals or their own idea of how the game should be played. There is nothing to unify them. There is no common purpose.
Games are not won by an individual on a team. Games are won by the team. We all know this to be true for athletics. Why is it any different for project teams? We expect our athletic teams to practice together. We expect them to set a common goal, to push each other outside their comfort zone, to be there to help each other out. Shouldn’t we expect the same of our project teams? Yet somehow the culture we build within business fosters the opposite. Somehow we concentrate on individual performance rather than team performance. We look for superstars rather than team players. We stretch communication lines further apart rather than bringing them together. We hinder the team’s ability to be a team.
Imagine what would happen if we asked a baseball team to practice on different fields. All pitchers practice on field A, catchers on field B, infielders on field C, outfielders on field D. It sounds absurd and yet this is what we ask of our project teams. We put project managers on their own floor. Business analysts are in a different building. Quality assurance is in the basement, the development team is off in another country. They all work on the same project and are expected to work towards a common goal. How can this be?
This is not to say there aren’t successful project teams. There are plenty but we certainly do a good job of making success painfully difficult for them. In an industry where billion dollar projects are shelved in an instant, where ideas are outdated before they see the light of day, we have got to dismantle the barriers and build teams.
Demming said quality can’t be put in after the fact. It must be built in from the beginning. I say the only way to be successful at it is for all members of the team to recognize quality as a goal and the role they each play in realizing this goal. Quality is not for heroes. Quality takes a team.
True words, some truthful words man. You made my day!!
Community is a team sport. The same barriers Christopher Alexander et al find eg logical planners, silos/isolation – disable community and it’s web of growing interactions and teams.
You might need ‘heroes’, in the trickster function, popping up new ideas and ways to be merged into innovations and the greater good.
The mention of QA in the basement brought back memories of long nights of getting code ‘thrown over the wall’!