Quality over Quantity

A project manager asked me for some coaching yesterday, thought I’d share it with you.

What she wanted help on, is how to know when a new solution is ready for the customer, whether the Finance organization, a business we sell to, or Sarah buying on a mobile app. As we drive towards technology at speed, agile delivery, fast to market, it can create a dilemma. We don’t want to launch something that disappoints, but we can’t afford to be slow in bringing value – How to reconcile these things.

What I’ve seen with many projects, especially at the beginning, is a desire to gather every possible requirement, every feature, function, capability that could ever be wanted, in huge blueprinting documents. Then under pressure to actually deliver something, it’s all developed as quickly as possible, shortcuts, workarounds, compromises are made to get everything possible into the solution and close off every ask. Then it’s launched and nothing works properly, it’s too complicated, users hate the thing and are quickly heading off to competitors or back to Excel. Even worse, customers carry on using it, but ignore and never use 80% of the features that were built.

The approach I advised her is to strive for quality not quantity. Customers will far more appreciate a solution that does the core of what they need it to do, and does it exceptionally well, with no workarounds or compromises on that core capability, rather than something that does everything, but poorly.

Far better to produce a quality trumpet with a beautiful tone and balance, than the cacophony of a one man band. Get it right from the beginning, don’t create huge requirements lists then trim, figure out early what the basics needed are, build it with quality, build it in a way that ensures it’s modular and extendable, launch it, then listen to your customers, observe how they use it, and build on the solution from there.

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