Bulldozer00's Blog

In big system development projects, continuous iteration and high speed error removal are critical to the creation of high quality products. Thus, it’s essential to install flexible and responsive Configuration Management and Quality Assurance (CMQA) support systems that provide easy access to intermediate work products that (most definitely) will require rework as a result of ongoing learning and new knowledge acquisition.

As opposed to virtually all methodologies that exhort early involvement of the CMQA folks in projects, I (but who the hell am I?) advise you to consider otherwise. If you have the power (and sadly, most people don’t), then keep the corpo CMQA orgs out of your knickers until the project enters the production phase. Why? Because I assert that most big company CMQA orgs innocently think they are the ends, and not a means. Thus, in order to project an illusion of importance, the org creates and enforces Draconian, Rube Goldberg-like, high latency, low value-added, schedule-busting procedures for storing work products in the vault of no return. Once project work products are locked in the vault, the amount of effort and time to retrieve them for error correction and disambiguation is so demoralizing and frustrating that most well-meaning information creators just give up. Sadly, instead of change management, most CMQA orgs unconsciously practice change prevention.

The figure below contrasts two different product developments in terms of when a CMQA org gets intertwined with the value creation project pipeline. The top half shows early coupling and the bottom half shows late coupling. Since upstream work products are used by downstream workgroups to produce the next stage’s outputs, the downstreamers will discover all kinds of errors of commission and (worse,) omission. However, since the project info has been locked in the vault of no return, if the culture isn’t one of infallible machismo, upstream producers and downstream consumers will circumvent the “system” and collaborate behind the scenes to fix mistakes and clarify ambiguities to increase quality. If and when that does happen, the low quality, vault-locked information gets out of synch with the informal and high quality information in the pipeline. Even though that situation is better than having both the vault and project pipeline filled with error infested information, post-delivery product maintenance teams will encounter outdated and incorrect blueprints when they retrieve the “formal” blueprints from the vault. Bummer.