To do quality assurance or not do quality assurance? Is that really the question?
Many business unit leaders soliloquize this question as they struggle to determine the value of quality. Lack of accountability in monitoring and controlling the business case ROI is a driver to this struggle. For example, portfolio manager’s goals and incentives are designed to release the “current” year’s initiatives as quick as they can and as cheap as they can. This pressure along with poorly delivered and understood requirements causes squeezed schedules resulting in quality becoming low priority. QA is the first “expense” to cut. At project completion, the initiative can be checked off the list as we happily head toward completing our portfolio goal. The danger here is true project costs can get hidden or ignored especially when resources are scheduled back to fix quality issues after a release. This then causes resource allocation and capacity challenges for new initiatives creating an out of sync inefficient delivery system. This scenario unfortunately plays out daily because of the poor decisions around the perception…quality is expensive and slow.
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