You build quality in – you can’t inspect it in
An effective Change Management process can be used to reduce the level of human error being introduced into the production environment. This is done not by inspecting quality into the applications and systems in question but by collecting metrics and identifying opportunities for process improvement. The noted quality guru W. Edwards Deming once quipped that you can’t inspect quality into a product – it’s already there. IT hardware, software and services are the same way. We don’t want to simply add inspectors instead we need processes to evolve and people to learn better ways of creating and delivering products and services that have an acceptable level of quality.
With Visible Ops we knew that by implementing Change Management the level of firefighting would be reduced. Some of the stories from practitioners have been very interesting. One group noted that they were perceived as having bad quality and were to be outsourced. They froze changes in preparation for outsourcing and the resulting stabilization was remarkable – so much so that management realized that process improvement was needed and the outsourcing project was cancelled. Granted that this story just identifies availability as one quality attribute and certainly others such as meeting the needs of the business and having proper security are important as well. Visible Ops can help address human error and organizations can either use it to begin their process improvement journey or use it as a comparison-other to benchmark their current processes against.