Mary & Tom Poppendieck – Failure Cost

This week I attended a course organised by Lean Data Solutions which covered the content of many of the Poppendick books and helped to refocus some of the practices. The course attendees were mostly from the UK with some travelling over from mainland Europe. Over the two days we covered several topics:

• Systems Thinking
• Technical Excellence
• Great People
• Reliable Delivery
• Relentless Improvement
• The Journey (change and mental models)

Each section was a mix of presentation and practical work which was used to help imbed the information from the previous section, several of the points triggered some new ways of viewing existing problems I am looking at professionally.

Failure Cost

The cost of not focusing on quality was reinforced as it has impact in several areas:

• Rework
• Delays
• Shortages
• Re-editing
• Downgrading
• Lack of Flexibility and Adaptability

The impact of an issue not being fixed can be financial marked against the cost of the client contact after it is released. An example of this is that the cost of handling customer emails and phone calls over a feature that is not complete. Most business do not consider this when they are evaluating the value of investing in fixing the issue in the code.

The long term cost is in the creation of bad will from customers.

We used the tools of Value Stream Mapping and Fault tree analysis to understand the route of the problem, I will elaborate in these more in a later post.

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Related posts:

1. Mary Poppendieck on Software Leadership
2. Agile Development in a Commercial Organisation