top10-quality-and-faster-3#3 in our list of the Top Characteristics of an Agile Organization is Quality and Faster.

Ryan and I have been talking about quality and faster as necessary components of an Agile organization for awhile. A non-Agile view of a successful organization would have us believe that pushing more and more features into a release and to the market necessitates a loss, or at least reduction or great variance, in quality. In an Agile organization, the thinking is quite the opposite.

Curiously, when we speak of quality and faster inside Rally or with clients, we talk about each being indispensable to the other.

For a traditional, non-Agile case study, let’s look at the RCA case study Ralph Aguayo brings up in his book “Dr. Deming: The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality.” At its height, RCA’s business model focused on getting as many televisions into the hands of consumers as possible. (Did your family have an RCA T.V. when you were growing up? Mine did!) Quality was secondary to the savings RCA could make from cheap components and speed of product to market. Cheap and fast meant greater profits. Well, as it turned out, no…

RCA's first color tv set - the CT 100

Nipper on RCA's first color tv set - the CT 100

Unfortunately for RCA, their model began to crumble when television sets started being returned due to defects, lots of them all still in the warranty period. The cost of attending to these faulty sets ended up being as much as 25% more than the cost of manufacturing the existing set.

Do you have a similar situation in your software product delivery? Are you trying to get profits by pushing features out with “defective parts” because they are “cheaper”?

And to throw another wrench into the works, are you taking so long to get these feature sets pushed out that you have too much of a delay in your feedback to find either the defects or the value of the features you pushed? In other words, is your emphasis on speed, at the expense of quality, coupled with very large feature-rich releases, exactly the wrong way to create greater value and fewer defects?

In an Agile organization, the entire organization concentrates on value delivery and quick feedback on that value.

That is, “are we delivering the right features to the market?” In turn, a real Agile organization understands, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” and they do increase throughput without the traditional expense of decreasing quality. Defects held in check through a “stop the line” mentality free-up the organization to always respond to value feedback information faster. Think about RCA. If your scarce resources are tied up in managing defects and “returns,” they can’t be working on new feature sets. Or the feature sets delivered are being pushed on defects not yet resolved.

And so, the notion of “quality and faster” is not so counterintuitive as we may have once thought.

We need faster and faster feedback loops in time-to-market in order to continuously improve our ability to deliver quality (defect-free and valuable) features back to the market. Symmetrically, we need higher and higher quality features that are not defect-ridden or dubious in value in order to respond ever faster and more innovatively to the market.

See our previous coverage of #10 Work/Life Balance, #9 Being a Servant and Leader, #8  Sustainable and Successful, #7 Contributing to the Community and the Company, #6 Collaborative and Smart, #5 Bottom-up and Top-down Decision Making and #4 Flexibility and Rhythm. Stay tuned for #2 “Creating Your Own Reality” and Corporate Vision.

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