How to Bring Everyone on a Journey…
I was recently asked my leadership team to present to the company about Quality.
I work in a Fin-tech firm as ‘Head of QA’. We have had a few issues with regards to some of the deliverables and I was brought in to help fix this. When I started working with them, I told them that I will not be in this role forever. My aim is to enable everyone in the company (and not just the engineering team) to think about quality.
The big question for me is though, how do I bring everyone on this journey?
When it was time for me to speak at the company meeting, I thought long and hard.
- Do I present a definition of quality assurance and means of adopting it? No, not inspiring.
- Do I bring out various quotes from leaders in the world of QA and elaborate on them with examples? No, not relevant. Yet.
- Do I talk about quality in the context of our products? Yes. But this needs to be done eventually.
I am a big fan of going back to the basics. Defining basics helps remind us of what is it that we are trying to explain and the problem that they solve.
So I thought of doing something similar for quality assurance. Go back to the basics. And I did this by playing Buzzword Bingo!
There were going to be two advantages of doing this:
- Engaging the audience
- Making quality everyone’s responsibility
So I went ahead and printed loads of Bingo cards where each square represented a buzzword related to quality assurance. Here is what I did:
‘As our CEO just said, Quality is not only my responsibility. It is OUR responsibility. I can stand here and define quality for all of us but that is not what I will do. We will play some Bingo. I will read out what I think is how quality assurance is defined. There will be some words in my sentences which you will see in your individual Bingo cards. Please strike them off.
I proceeded with my definition of Quality Assurance. (Everyone intently started striking off words.) I then requested everyone to stand up and subsequently started seating everyone down with the least amount of words. In the end, I had 4 people left; the CEO, an architect, a mid-level engineer and a grad.
These 4 individuals are my Quality Champions! (some rolling eyes and a lot of laughter)’
What does this mean? These people will help further my vision in the organisation for Quality Assurance. I will be creating this vision along-with my Quality Engineers and Engineering leadership team. I will then create some tasks which these individuals will help me achieve as it will fall naturally in their work.
My ultimate goal is to enable everyone to think about Quality. My success will be determined by the fact that everyone in the organisation starts questioning whether we are delivering quality products or not.
At-least this is my vision…..let’s see how it goes from here :)
