Hey, happy Monday, today we are going to focus on quality but especially the importance, economically, of working with quality.
We will do this with two guests.
We will meet the first one LIVE today, Monday, May 16 at 12:30 pm.
In the STRTGY Meeting №16 you will meet Domenico Sturabotti, Director of Symbola, the foundation for Italian qualities, who will present the fifth edition of the Design Economy 2022 research, a work carried out together with Deloitte Private and Poli.Design that analyzes the impact of Design on the Italian economy.
We will see how, numbers in hand, winning companies have a very specific recipe for success: they use Design as a strategic process rather than just an aesthetic improvement.
Thirty minutes before the event, at 12:00 noon sharp, you will receive the link to access the room on Zoom in which we will all meet. As always remember that this is not a webinar like the others in which you just listen, in the STRTGY Meeting you will be able to turn on the camera and microphone and interact directly with the guests, cool right?
The second guest, on the other hand, I interviewed him in advance of Product Management Day 22 to be held in Rome on June 25, 2022. We will be there live as well. Are you coming by to see us? If so, you can use (and spread) our discount code to get -15% off both physical and virtual tickets.
He is Andrea Portuese, Agility & Quality Manager at ConTe.it. With him we will address quality from a different point of view, that of the Product.
This interview is the backstage of his talk that will talk in detail about how he and his team have managed to combine speed and quality while improving the user experience and the company’s profitability.
I’ll leave you to the content and hope to meet you live!
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS
Antonio
● PRODUCTS / Speed & Quality
Is it possible to combine speed and quality?
A: Hi Andrea, introduce yourself to those who are reading us.
Andrea: I’m Andrea Portuese, I work as Agility & Quality Manager in ConTe.it, an insurance intermediary operating in the online market whose core business is auto liability and which is also diversifying into other products.
I have worked for 15 years in Agile HR contexts and am very familiar with the people dynamics related to this world. In fact, mine has been an Agile Coach role since ConTe.it made the transition to Scaled Agile SAFe and I was on the transformation team.
Quality management is my main area. I make sure our deliverables have the quality to meet customer expectations throughout the entire value chain: from when we identify the customer’s needs to when we monitor the bug.
A: What is SAFe and why was it important to ConTe.it?
Andrea: SAFe Scaled Agile is a framework, one of many that have been designed for the past two decades, that has been mistreated in part by agilists because it seems elephantine and complicated. However, I would like to focus on the positives of the framework that have benefited the company.
The main ones are:
- productivity: we do more things, we have multiplied the number of releases by 4 than before;
- happiness: we are happier-we measure this through a trust index-because there is more transparency, alignment and communication;
- time to market, we have become faster, we have reduced it by 50%.
We still have room for improvement on quality: we have become faster, more productive and happier but we also do something less well.
In my talk at PMDAY22 I would like to answer a recurring question:
“How can things be done quickly, at a fast pace, while maintaining high quality?”
A: How do you measure quality in a company like yours?
Andrea: By nature we measure metrics related to software quality assurance.
We mainly monitor the time frame for urgent interventions and strive to reduce it through a “quality by design” process and by improving the acceptance criteria of a user story. We ensure that these user stories meet the customer’s expectations and that the supply chain does not get lost, which sometimes happens.
A: Why is a figure like yours important for those who are adopting a product mindset? And how do you position yourself in relation to the product manager?
Andrea: The product manager is a key figure in the company.
Those in this role can make a difference on quality. In fact, the product manager always has problems with quality-these can become an opportunity for improvement to achieve excellence.
A story of change toward quality
A: Who will you address during the talk and what will people take home after listening to you?
Andrea: The talk will be useful for Product Managers, Product Owners and Scrum Masters. They will take home a story of change.
At ConTe.it we were noticing problems related to software quality too late, unfortunately already in the production phase. Therefore, we mapped our value chain to detect problems early, right from the functional requirements stage.
The ‘approach is based on adopting a systemic view that we talk a lot about in the agile world. We have created our own quality manifesto with values and principles, linked it to process visibility (agile teaches us to make what you do visible), and now we are doing what is called measure and learning to identify all the gaps that need to be filled with a view to continuous improvement.
Telling the story of ConTe.it will help to understand the method we used: the key aspect is learning to understand that today it is possible to anticipate problems and be really customer centric to avoid making people fall out of love with products that do not work.
The economics of quality
A: How do you get people to dissolve resistance to change?
Andrea: Time must be spent explaining the rationale for a quality pathway, starting with the CEO and going all the way down to the teams.
It is useful to have a solid internal communication plan to improve inclusiveness: listening to everyone’s doubts, fears and questions. Feedback improves processes.
Quality very often is perceived as a cost, and that is a very dangerous bias, especially for those with IT backgrounds or who are developers, people who know how important it is to go fast.
We need to move away from the concept of delivering and not learning in favor of an approach that explains the rationale for a process, values it in economic terms, and allows product managers to measure the economic impact of their choices.
This is something that not all companies do. Quality can be represented by an economic value, it must become something prioritized like all other backlog items. Quality coupled with money becomes immediately tangible.
When I want to make the concept clear, I ask a question that always works: “Is it better to fix something that costs us 100 now or do it later when it might cost us 300?”
A: What resource do you recommend reading before listening to your talk?
Andrea: A free article on Built-in Quality featured on the Scaled Agile website.
It concerns the concept of quality at the outset as a method of anticipating problems so as not to have to deal with them at the end.
In ConTe.it we are working on it now: initially the concept of quality at the start didn’t take root, we only thought about producing. But now we’ve realized that if you don’t have good quality at the start, you can’t win.
