Sadly, these days most managers are more interested in the cost of quality than in quality itself. Essentially, they're wondering 'how low can we take our quality before we start losing customers?' They might permit us to improve quality up to a point, beyond which they see further improvements in quality as a poor investment. When a manager warns us that we're in danger of putting too much time and effort into quality, he's wrong! We can't take quality too far.
And when scope, time and cost are fixed, as is so often the case these days, we've all been guilty of habitually cutting quality to meet the deadline. It's madness! This is one of the major contributing factors to project failure.
When you continuously improve quality the defect count is significantly reduced and there are fewer delays. You find yourself with more time to spend on adding new features that are valuable to your customers. Productivity is increased and costs are reduced. People are happy in their jobs. Existing customers see more of the features they've requested materialise in the product with fewer defects, which secures their continuing loyalty. And new customers are attracted to your product because it's feature-rich, has a higher quality and is more reliable than competitor products and comes at a lower price. All this is very good for business.
Previous Topic
