The Seapine View

As a consultant, I have been exposed to many different development methodologies and processes. In most cases, assignments are performed by a person that is aware of staff resources and distributes tasks according to the availability of these resources.
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The prefix meta- is used to mean about its own category. For example, under the umbrella of business intelligence you often hear the term “metadata” which means data concerning data. For purposes of this short post, “metaquality” could be described as the process and operations through which quality assurance impacts the quality of the customer experience (quality concerning quality) through all phases of the customer lifecycle. Your customers generally move through a decision making process which opens the gate for multiple functional areas to have potential impact on the customer experience:

• Awareness and need identification
• Explore and qualify alternatives
• Solution discovery and evaluation
• Negotiation and purchase decision
• Implementation and post sales service
• After purchase acclimation and evaluation

At each strategic stage of the process, research & development, marketing, sales, services and finance will have various levels of influence on the quality of the overall customer experience; which means quality assurance during all phases of the customer lifecycle is critical. In the Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment we asked respondents: “What level of priority does your company currently assign to building quality into your software development environment?”  Nearly 65% of our over 900 respondents rated their software quality initiatives as high or one of their top priorities. However; it also appears that many companies are still not committed to quality improvement.  In other words, they are only paying lip service about quality, and as a result there is a discrepancy with how their customers view the relationship.  Consider the following statistics from the Cutter Consortium, an IT advisory firm.

• 32% of organizations say they release software with too many defects.
• 38% of organizations believe they lack an adequate software quality assurance program.
• 27% of organizations do not conduct any formal quality reviews.

The current combination of declining customer satisfaction levels and economic concerns is creating the perfect customer experience storm.  In this type of business climate those companies that focus on quality will be the ones that come out on top. That means a relentless and coordinated approach to quality improvement across all functional areas has never been more important.

Did you happen to see the front cover of the April 7^th copy of “InformationWeek?”  The picture was related to the article “The end run around IT – and how CIO’s can prevent it” by John Soat.  Of all the executive level positions to choose from, why was “Marketing” pictured as the player making the sweeping end run in the OPPOSITE direction of the CIO?

Well, marketing automation, marketing optimization, marketing resource management, BI / customer profitability projects, SEM, and social networking initiatives (just to name a few) do provide plenty of technology situations in which it might be tempting to bypass my CIO and ask for forgiveness later.  On the other hand, I prefer a play book in which the CMO and CIO are leading the charge together with power sweeps.  Let me explain; at USC, opponents are often fed a healthy diet of the Trojans’ famed “student body left” and “student body right” toss sweeps. Hordes of very large sized linemen lead fleet tailbacks left or right with regularity for healthy gains.  In a like manner, I’ve found my marketing strategy is more likely to produce healthy gains when I keep my IT organization in tight, leading the charge with me.

With that said, how about your development and QA organizations?  Are they in tight leading the power quality sweep for competitive gains that result in customer loyalty and healthy profitability?  Or does it sometimes look like end runs heading in opposite directions?

The Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment (www.seapine.com/qualityready) asked the following key question:  How well do your development and QA teams collaborate? To date we’ve had nearly 600 responses to our survey, and the results are very interesting. The answers follow:

1. Regularly scheduled meetings keep the development and QA teams up-to-date.  29%
2. All team members stay informed of each other’s tasks and progress through automatic assignments, email notifications, and RSS feeds.  24%
3. The QA manager is informed when development is completed.  18%
4. The teams do not interact. New builds are “thrown over the wall” when they are completed.  16%
5. Development teams track their status in a spreadsheet, which the QA team can access to check the project status.  13%

At a glance it appears about half of those who have taken the survey are facing 3^rd and long situations.  By that I mean there isn’t tight collaboration between development and QA capable of producing a sustainable competitive quality-drive.  For your marketing and sales counterparts that’s disappointing news because the odds are low that they’ll be able to provide the Hail Mary pass capable of keeping your customer relationship drive alive.  No matter how you try to spin it – poor quality is a tough sell, especially in the red zone.

Does your software development and QA strategy clearly support your customer relationship strategy?  Feel free to take my polling question (to the right) and let’s see how many power sweeps are in play.

In Search of Failure.  That’s the title of chapter seven in Frederick Reichheld’s book “The Loyalty Effect” (©1996).  In that chapter Reichheld points out that an investor who built a stock portfolio out of the companies profiled in the book “In Search of Excellence” (Peters and Waterman ©1982) would have seen their returns trounced by the mediocre performance of the S&P index during the ten year period following the books 1982 publication.  In fact, by time Reichheld’s book came out in 1996 only one-fifth of the original companies profiled as “excellent” had remained excellent.

If success breeds success, how in the “quest for benchmarking best practices” did those companies lose their lofty status?  In Reichheld’s opinion what really helps us to achieve excellence is actually the study of failure.  It’s not exactly in our nature to seek out failure though; in fact, your career is probably linked to success, which means that getting too close to failure may feel threatening.  However, most people will admit that mistakes are often better teachers than success.  In fact, QA experts will attest that when one component fails, it can cast a spotlight on the workings of an entire program.

The analysis of failure is not that easy; but when the analysis leads to sustained quality the pay-off is big.  In the Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy (PIMS) project the researchers (Buzzell and Gale, 1987) reported that the profitability of a business is affected by 37 basic factors. Based on analysis of information available in the PIMS database, Buzzell and Gale hypothesized that in the long run, the most important single factor affecting a business unit’s performance is the quality of its products and services relative to those of competitors.

The trick is to set up a process and system to track, test, analyze, and address potential issues, defects or problems before they negatively impact profitability.  In many ways quality and value are interlocked.  Customer value proposition models are based on the idea that customers with different needs require different experiences and different value propositions if the relationship between the customer and company is to be mutually beneficial.  And no value proposition will succeed in delivering profit to a company unless the customer perceives the product (or service) as meeting their needs best.