Tag Archives: Pattern

How Do You Motivate the Team to Act Proactively? Four Thoughts

Situation: A company has developed a good team to support its projects. They work together well and demonstrate good work habits. However, the CEO wants to improve communications between team members, and also between herself and team members. When challenges arise, she wants to hear about them proactively, on a timely basis and with recommended solutions. How do you motivate the team to act proactively?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Is this just a question of communication within the team, or is there also concern with communication beyond the team?
    • There are two long-term employees who consistently demonstrate a poor work ethic; however, due their seniority and relationships with the Foreman, this is tolerated.
  • What steps should be taken to deal with this situation?
    • The Foreman reports directly to the CEO. The proper way to deal with this is to develop a solution that serves the interests of the company.
    • The company lives and breathes on customer satisfaction. If any worker shows a pattern of substandard work, this negatively impacts both the image and the value of the company.
  • Clear and fair standards and expectations are critical:
    • Establish a policy that workers are responsible for assuring that work meets standards before completing a job.
    • Establish a list of specific standards for work, and job checklists to assure that work is complete and meets standards. Spot check to assure that the work and checklists meet standards.
    • If a supervisor finds work performed below standard this will result in a warning to the worker. If the worker continues to perform substandard work, this becomes grounds for termination.
    • If a worker misrepresents the quality of work performed on a final project checklist, this is grounds for immediate termination.
    • Ask key managers and supervisors for input on the policy. This is not a democratic process, but others should be given an opportunity for input.
    • Post the policy and provide all employees with a copy. Communicate the policy openly both verbally and in writing.
  • Meet informally and frequently with the team to deepen relationships with them and between each other.

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Who Owns Quality Control? Eight Recommendations

Situation: The CEO of a company has a problem. Quality control is an essential part of the company’s success, but ownership of quality control issues is proving difficult. When more than one department is involved, each blames the other for issues or deficiencies. Who owns quality control?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • At the end of the day the project owner must own this responsibility. This individual can delegate work but not accountability.
  • QC must be embedded within the company’s systems. In addition, someone has to walk in daily to ask what is wrong with this project? What can be done better? A skeptic.
  • Put a skeptic in the QC role – the job is to find what’s wrong, not what’s right – a tactical skeptic.
    • Skeptics are ideal for design reviews.
    • It isn’t necessary to hire someone for this role if there’s already a productive skeptic on staff.
    • This person needs to be vocal and will irritate some of the other staff. Coach staff to tolerate this, because the individual is performing an essential role.
  • It’s impossible to check everything. However, as issues are identified, everything can be documented.
    • As systems are reviewed, look for patterns of problems.
    • Develop solutions as problems are identified.
    • Log issues and solutions on a shared server to facilitate access by project managers.
  • Institute cross-functional design reviews – representatives from different functions offer different perspectives. Formalize design reviews in the early and start-up stages of projects.
  • Work on company culture – build anticipation of challenges into the culture.
  • Build a heuristic of the output of each program. Use this to make sure that inputs, filters and system checks will produce the desired output and the desired level of quality.
  • Ask: where is QC currently working within the company? Why is it working?
    • Operations and testers catch the errors.
    • The issue is distributing the knowledge gained. In complex systems nobody understands the full picture or the impact on the customer.
    • This becomes the responsibility of the project owner.

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