Author: Rajesh Patil (MBTI Certified , PMI-ACP, CSM, CSPO, MS in Engineering Management and Leadership)
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pmrajpatil
Email: pmrajpatil@gmail.com
My passion towards "Quality" is not new, it has changed both my personal and professional life in a good way.
When I started my career in Project and Program Management many years ago, I felt like I was missing a key element of a product development while execution.
The same old "Iron Triangle" talks about triple constraints of any project management:
Scope
Cost
Schedule
When asked about Quality, every project manager on this planet will say "Quality is in the middle of the triangle", since its very important. In an ideal project management world ignoring quality is crime, it has become a political statement to say "Quality is very important", but when asked "What are you doing about quality?" it is just an event that happens at the end of the project with a team who are considered as quality experts or QA team and are responsible to sign-off on a product delivery before its released..
QA teams responsibility is to try breaking the product and surfacing the defects before the product is in consumers hand.
On the contrary when you ask the project manager or the QA team, they also agree that "No product is defect free in a software world" and we get to hear the examples of Microsoft releasing Windows OS with known defects. I agree 100% with them, knowing the fact that all software products are abstract and they have many unknowns, a defect free product is near to impossible.
But in a aeronautical or construction business the above statement would be life threatening and very expensive.
My search on truly understanding and enforcing quality aspects of a product development lead to "Agile World", Agile communities have figured out how to enforce quality while the product is developed and not at the end of the development cycle by introducing iterative development and delivery of potential shippable product after every sprint.
The concept of Enterprise Agility follows these 3 key elements of any product development:
1. Value
2. Quality
3. Contraints
Value - Agile focuses on the business value we are trying to deliver
Quality - Agile made quality a key element of project management
Constraints - Agile continues to believe in the 3 constraints of project management because they are critical for any product development.
I am a true believer on Agile since it aligns with my personal principles of product development and quality.
Even though Agile helps to deliver better quality products compared to other traditional methodology, I feel that the importance of quality is limited to product development and not product life-cycle.We are not measuring the quality aspects of a product after it's released to consumers.
Consumers do have multiple ways to rate a product and provide feedback to help the product owner improve the product with new releases/updates, but I and my 8 year old son were not satisfied with the mixed reviews consumers give on the web; sometimes its confusing and crowded.
Something was missing, so a debate started between me and my son TanishQ (Did you notice a letter "Q" in his name, call it extreme, I call him TQ)
Everytime I plan to buy a toy for him, I ask him 3 basic quality questions:
1. Does this toy truly do what it claims to do? - A True Quality feature
Ex: If it's a "Remote Control Car" , does it run without wires and controlled by remote?
2. Do other features of the toy perform well ? - A Total Quality feature
Ex: Is the toy sturdy enough, fast enough, stylish enough?
3. When compared with other brands or manufacturers, where does it stand? - A Top Quality feature
Ex: Is this remote controlled car better then other competition brands?
These 3 criterion's of quality (our patent pending concept) and my son's name always became our guidelines for shopping until they get ruled-out by our "High-Command" due to cost or choice.
We wanted to bring this similar concept to the rest of the world, so we am currently working on building a prototype for an online based application that will help consumers to rate a product , person, place or process with these 3 quality criteria discovered by me and my son TQ.
My hope is to give the world another element for decision making needs before they do a purchase, visit a place , follow a process, and meet a person.
Rating+, comments, and feedback are crowded and confusing, the world needs something simple and precise and my hope is that my new product based on Quality Ratings will help solve the problem to certain extent.
Please be tuned to see a simple prototype and please contact me if you are interested to review the prototype by just sending me an email @ pmrajpatil@gmail.com or commenting on this blog article.
The patent pending concept of "True Quality", Total Quality" , and "Top Quality" is fully owned by Rajesh Patil and TanishQ Patil. We have shared it on the blog to introduce our prototype for feedback.
Disclaimer: My blog is my personal opinion and not connected to my employer or employees. Everything I write is wholly my personal experience and opinion that's not been validated or certified by anybody.
If you have concerns or questions regarding this article, please contact Rajesh Patil at pmrajpatil@gmail.com
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