Monday, October 1, 2012

The Quality Velocity and Balance

by Dr. Lotto Lai @ Quality Alchemist

The September Topic of ASQ Influential Voice was raised by Paul Borawski (CEO, ASQ) that "Quality should or should not change despite the rapidly changing world". I would like to use the term "Quality Velocity" to explain the trend of faster change on product and service.

For software development, the velocity is calculated by counting the number of units of work completed in a certain interval, and determined at the start of the project. The key point behind velocity is to help teams estimate how much work they can complete in a given time interval based on how quickly similar work was previously completed. Quality Velocity is committed to delivering the highest quality products or services, on time, each time and every time you buy to meet the requirement of shorter and shorter product/service life cycle.

However, it has a trade-off between Quality and Speed. For instance, the shorter time to launch a product would sacrifice its reliability. It demonstrated the contradiction between quality and speed.

On the other hand, some fashion product, like mobile phone, need more new models launching in the shorter period of time but the reliability requirement may be reduced. The old mobile phone (before smart phone) could use for five years as an example. Now the new smart phone's reliability design may be for two years because people would like to change the new fashion smart phone frequently.

In here, I would like to suggest to employ TRIZ (TheoriaResheneyvaIsobretatelskehuhZadach) (Theory of Solving Problems Inventively) to solve this problem. There were included 39 Engineering Parameters and 40 Innovation Principles in which formed a famous table called "Contradiction Matrix". The matrix demonstrated which of the 40 principles have been used most frequently to solve a problem that involves a particular contradiction.

Innovation is the way to achieve the balance between Quality and Speed.

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