Rewind the clock five months

As promised I am going back to the beginning of my current effort to raise the visibility and importance of quality in the organization.

What is quality? There are so many definitions, the most concise one that I could find is: "degree of excellence" from Merriam-Webster dictionary. This definition leaves lots to be defined, if we look up excellence we get "the quality of being excellent". This seems almost like a circular definition if you combine these together "degree of (the quality of being excellent)". How can I sell this to executives, or even those that I manage directly?

Talking with my executive sponsor for this initiative I found out that the top three goals of this program were to 1) gather a group of existing quality leaders from all business units to attend regular meetings and share their best practices; 2) get products closer to continuous delivery (from quarterly or longer releases to something much faster); 3) do this in small incremental changes.

This seemed like something we could finish in a couple of months, surely there are others in the organization that want to join and contribute and move the organization forward. I left the first meeting with a sense of excitement, I was picked to lead this and I figured that everyone I would interact with in the near future would be ready to learn and happy to receive feedback on processes and potential improvements.

I had numerous 1x1 meetings with my executive sponsor and other trusted advisors that I have throughout the organization. I was testing my ideas and the setup of the initial focus areas that the QCoE should start with.

Mid-November was the kick off meeting for the group, I used a list of quality leads and managers that was provided to me by the executive sponsor and invited all of them. Our first meeting was attended by 16 people in addition to myself, a collection of predominantly quality engineers from most of the lines of business. We talked about the executive level program and how this Quality Center of Excellence fits into other improvement projects that are going on in the enterprise. We talked through all of this and defined 7 focus areas. Each of those areas needed to have an "owner" or chairperson.

Of course I forgot to record the WebEx so that it could be shared with others that were invited but did not attend. Realizing this, I sent out an email update to everyone invited and included the presentation slides and a summary of the meeting. I also requested volunteers for the focus areas that I had defined. Over the next couple of weeks I had received sporadic interest in some of the focus areas and took it as an opportunity to learn more about the other person and their teams and products they test. I also sent out several SurveyMonkey surveys one per focus area hoping I could get information from each person and product and that would help to formulate the basis for the next meetings and identify the "biggest bang for the buck" areas to start with improvement activities.