This post is my own reflection after reading Harvard Business Review article of Nov. 2011 here. This article focuses on six perspectives or convoluted means which great organizations must have in-order to succeed in today’s globalized economy, which are:
1. Common purpose
2. Long-term focus
3. Emotional engagement
4. Partnering with the public
5. Innovation
6. Self-organization Continue reading
The setup is a project involving sub-contractors from different vendors working in highly regulated industry.
The objective is how to make these diverse skills work as self-organized team?
The challenges are:
– Strong command and control culture.
– Non streamlined views on how work needs to be done.
– People work independently with fear to become inter-dependent.
For a product development organization, being driven by man-hours as measure for managing its operations, lends itself to the command and control zone of management. Instead of measuring and tracking how we meet client demand, the focus is shifted on controlling this measure.
This measure leads the organization to judge its performance based on the cost of its people instead of Throughput. Instead of being considered opportunity, people are perceived as liability. Therefore, Man-hours emphasize on maximizing people utilization. Continue reading
For me QA has always been confusing at best. QA scope can include any of the following activities:
- Testing
- Code review
- Document review
- Process improvement
- Process appraisal and auditing
- Implementing engineering quality practices (e.g. TDD or Continuous Integration)
- Producing documents
- ISO or CMMI compliance
- Coordination
- Bug tracking
