This is a summary of some high level advice I put together for a friend starting his first position in which he would lead a department. In this case it was the test engineering department for a hardware company. The group needed to improve, but the complaints from above were vague.

How do we do this better

Assume we are starting with this question.  Begs the question of “what is it that we do?” and “who is the we?” Can we get those on paper?  How do we know things are not as good as they could be?

What is process and what are the projects

Projects are one offs.  Process guides standard ongoing operations.  There are often parts of projects that can be standardized, like requirements gathering and stakeholder identification, risk labeling etc.  Create some lists of what is done ongoingly and what current and recent projects, upcoming projects are.  Use the concepts from “Just enough project management” by cook.

Separating people from process and roles

Rather than “Jim is the problem” take systems look at how we do things.  Use the “How to measure anything” by Hubbard model for setting up roles that can be evaluated for performance.  Break out the toolkit for role definition and fuzzy measures and discuss tying that into the review process.

Defining roles, responsibilities, and stakeholders

Traditional RASIC stuff.  Match authority to responsibility.  Identify key skills we may be missing.  Identify communications channels and how they work now, where the disappointments come in.  Are there others in the organization we should be talking to now, before we start thinking we can change and improve things?  How do we communicate how much work is reasonable to expect from this team?  How do we communicate to stakeholders who are potentially at odds about what our priorities are?   Introduce the questions to answer to have an effective team from “First break all the rules” by Buckingham.  They start with “Do I know what is expected of me at work?”  How do we ensure the team has a “psychologically safe space” to work in where mistakes are OK.  How do we tailor the process so mistakes are not repeated?

How much process

Deep dive into what roles and processes make sense for your company landscape. Look at what is realistic improvement given the political climate.  We want the minimum of process and the smallest set of roles that will get us where we want to be.  What is our regulatory obligation?  “Checklist manifesto” by Gawande style process creation.  Use the philosophy of “have a long list and make it easy to check many items as NA”. 

How do we ensure we don’t forget things that often come up and have useful records and still allow smart people to make smart decisions for all the exception handling that has to occur.  What are the mistakes we have repeated?  What checks and balances are in place now?  Which checks and balances need to be added?

Are there processes that slow us down now?  Where did those come from, don’t want to have a “Chesterton’s Fence” situation.  Do we need to use a Kanban approach?  Is there a maximum number of projects that is reasonable for a team this size given the normal operations we also have to execute?  Do we need an agile approach for parts of our projects?  Are some of our projects waterfall by nature?

For the pieces that are ongoing operations, what are the bottlenecks?  Take a “Theory of Constraints” by Goldratt analysis of those.

Outside perspectives

Who else should we be talking to that may be expert or at least have experience in getting to where we think we need to be?  Who else might be aware of things we don’t even know we are missing?  Can we get started with just a few conversations to get a sense?

Estimating projects

Are we estimating projects?  Are there business decisions being made based on our estimates?  Are our estimates regularly too optimistic or pessimistic?  Are our estimates, or predictions of the future, being turned into commitments we then feel obligated to deliver on?  Do we need process around estimation and communication of estimation?  This opens up the project planning toolkit discussion.  Looking at past projects, what level of data we have on effort and scope of those.

Tools

What tools do we use now for bug tracking, versioning, automated test, release, documentation, project management, document management etc.  Are these the right tools for today, for where we are going?

Ensuring the improvement sticks

Begs the question of “were the changes improvements?”.  Setting up feedback on this process.  In Quality Systems it might be a CAPA system.  How do we get to:

1. Have a written plan
2. Execute from the written plan
3. Update the written plan

Again we want the minimum of process drag that allows a reduction in disappointments of stakeholders and a maximum of well being for the people doing the work.