Why QA is never on CEO’s mind?
Manav Ahuja
Author | Founder & Managing Partner @ Stratgyk | Rewriting the Dreams, Deals, and Disasters playbook for Small and Medium Businesses
Yes QA. Neither Quality, nor Testing but QA.
What is common among- Grounding of 737 max, Equifax mega breach, NASA’s climate orbiter or British Airways glitch? Simple - compromise on “Quality”. Last couple of decades are full of instances when a company or more importantly the CEO lost track of the most underrated word in the industry today called “Quality” and the consequences were devastating for both the company and the shareholders alike.
In a recent report, Mckinsey categorizes CEOs into 6 mindsets and 18 practices. One of the important aspects on mindset revolves around building the organization culture on resilience to better prepare the organization to handle risks before they come knocking on the door. However, at no point any CEO or an organization talks about QA at the center of what they do and how they do it. We think quality as a noun is twisted, turned and leveraged for convenience. The only time it takes precedence is when something has gone wrong or an incident is in the process of pushing an organization to oblivion. With this base, we launched an effort to create a research paper on “Why QA is never on CEO’s mind?
Let’s understand WHW. [Why – How come – so What]
W - Why?Because CEOBasket is full.
There are different theories as to why QA does not occupy the same mind share on a leader board. Some being that Quality is desired but is not something that will generate immediate shareholder value or to change a company’s destiny by helping them develop new products or services. To dig deeper we started on two stage effort.
Stage 1:
We launched a survey to a wide array of professionals in our network from testers to CEO’s and received over 100 responses.
Our findings challenged our own widely held assumptions. E.g. someone said, “CEO is what his second layer says or reports”. Other bluntly echoed “My business team doesn’t need you. Did you talk to them?”. Our most important awakening was when one respondent challenged “Have you met your CEO?” and another point blank “As CEO, I got 3 years; QA doesn’t get me drive priorities. You guys run marathon, I want Bolt or Kipchoge, right now”? As we dug through the responses, here’s what we learnt broadly
Stage 2:
Tap into the studies, researches that provide in-depth information on key attributes that power CEO performance or lack of. Our focused outcome to understand CEO mindset.
Learning from our research including white papers, “CEO Genome Project” and “The mindset and practices of excellent CEO’s” a McKinsey report we define our very own “MaSh's CEOBasket” from a QA lens.
Measurement scale:
MaSh's "CEOBasket"
H - How come?
In today’s fast changing world of technology, a CEO has limited window to turn things around or embark on the journey of accelerated growth. Things like OPEX, CAPX and growth strategies occupy most of their thoughts and thus QA takes a back seat until the point when a fiasco emerges to push it to the forefront for a short span or when their own job hang in the balance.
W - so What?
All this has changed as the world sinks into an oblivion of COVID19, CEO’s are already realizing the gaps in technology. May it be infrastructure breakdown; denial-of-service attacks or performance degradation of the systems due to increased web traffic. In post COVID world, CEO’s will have QA on their mind not by choice but by need. Irrespective of industry or domain there is a new normal on the horizon and CXO’s need to drive through seamless experience for their employees and customers alike. Two big focus areas that come into mind immediately are securing the core systems and enhancing the security infrastructure and thus the play for quality to ensure smooth experience and drive customer loyalty.
As organizations move to gain digital edge, their transformation goals might move to programs like Cloud, data and agility. Here comes the need for robust and scalable quality organization to support these initiatives and ensure the success of these transformation initiatives not only in the short term but, providing a pivotal foundation on which the technology infrastructure will scale to the new business dynamics.
CEO’s who will able to recognize this change and leverage the QA teams within their organizations will lead the way in post COVID world of business. Others might continue to use the QA organization as a rubber stamp and will struggle to get their organization to next frontier of normal.
A Bonus ‘W’, to get your help on - What do you think - “Why QA is never on CEO’s mind?
Researched & Authored by : Shantanu Chandra and Manav Ahuja
ISTQB | 10 x Salesforce Certified | Triple Star Ranger | SAFe Certified | SIT | End to End | UAT Testing | Database | Automation:BDD | Web-services | EDI | Test Estimation | Test Management | People Management
4 年Nice article really it will be a game changer waiting for your next blogs to read. In today’s fast pace world everyone wants to ship their products at earliest as that’ll generate revenue and often feels that one can live without QA; but what one misses, potential impacts if QA processes are not given priority during the entire lifecycle.
Hi Manav, great topic and post. It was quite interesting to read the perspectives that the study has revealed. I believe that quality or QA is mostly implicit in everything that a CEO thinks and does. CEO possibly was the first quality engineer....who had infused quality into everything....long before the term quality engineering became a fad and the name of a community :)
Specialist in Quality Management, GxP, Regulatory Compliance, and AI/ML Validation
4 年Nice and crisp article that reflects on what is happening in the industry. Thanks for sharing. In my view, there are two important aspects that needs correction especially in the IT / technology organisations: 1) CEOs / CXOs focus mostly on the financial targets / collections etc..probably that's what they are being evaluated against? The problem could also be coming from the board who is running/driving the org's, where you typically don't see goals/targets on product quality / non-compliance. Also do we see head of quality part of the board meetings? 2) Lot of people who are in leadership position lack structured process approach to correct and fix things. Often quick fixes and stop gap solutions are done and people move on from their current leadership role after couple of years..its a pain for QA to see this happening and leadership not listening to their QA for a solution that can scale and sustain in the first place. People need to learn from organisations like Toyota where quality is most important and understand why they are so successful. Organisations should also help their existing leaders and potential leaders to grow (thru structured learning and mentoring programs).
Director at Cognizant Technology Solutions
4 年Well narrated! Will look for the next update.
QA COE Head - Director | Quality Assurance | Generative AI | MBA, B. Tech
4 年Very well explained !!