Friday, February 4, 2011

Demings Principals


These are my principals and if you don’t like them I have others ~ Groucho Marx

Edward Deming’s Quality Principles are designed to foster a culture of management and a sense of individual responsibility for every member of a given organization to that organizations role in industry. Deming’s principals are rooted in the work of Walter A. Shewhart of Bell Lab’s fame.[i] As a physicist and satiation he aided in the rebuilding of Japans economy after World War II and maintained a critical influence over industrial quality control and industry up until his passing in 1993.  It is stated that he is one of many key people in influencing the Japanese to produce products of a greater quality and on a greater scale than those in the United States.
A principle is defined as a fundamental assumption or a rule used to choose among solutions to a problem; with respect to Deming we may assume that his principals were derived from his view of the laws of nature due to his education in Physics and Statistics[ii].  
For the purposes of this article we will consider the following statements of the available 14 principals:

Create Constancy of Purpose

The nature of business is rooted in trade, the standard definition from the science of economics fundamentally defines this as the production of goods and services that offer value to other members or organizations in society and are exchanged for something of value. Every business has the fundamental requirement for Labour, Capital and Land[iii]; of these the goals created by the principals are to improve the quality of any given good or service by improving the process and procedure used to create it.
The goal of having a constancy of purpose is to create quality assurance plans that involve long-term strategies and ensure that those charged with testing software components have comprehensive plans used to test and verify the software being produced; as well as encouraging the integration of good ideas and implementing continuous improvement methods[iv]. These ideas are quite visible in formal methodologies such as the Bhoem Spiral[v], V, Waterfall, Agile and Iterative methodologies. They are even formalized by such standards as the Capability Maturity Model (CMMI)[vi] and ISO development standards.
Once common case study used within industry is the now infamous “Denver International Airport” baggage handling system development. It’s ensuing failure has been documented time and time again with respect to the litany of failures in software engineering and associated cost; it is world reendowed and studied in business and operations management as how not to develop software.[vii] The argued cause of this great failure was a lack of co-ordinated decision making and proper risk management, but one may argue the underlying lack of purpose and vision were major factors.
The primary ideal behind a “Constant Purpose” is to act as motivation for every developer within a group. The French call it a “Reson d’etre”; The Japanese of Okinawa refer to it as “Ikigai”[viii] The idea is best translated as a “Reason for being”; with respect to software this translates into looking at the project from various perspectives; that of the present to determine and document simple specifications and conduct good formal requirements analysis; and the distant future to ensure that the considerations for sustainable lifecycle are met.
These include considering the change of developers supporting a given application or portfolio; the avoidance of such practices as undocumented solutions going into production systems without formal verification testing.
The reified concept of Deming’s first principal is to allow a given developer within any group of developers to use their better judgement, training and education to contribute in a positive manner to the project on which they are assigned as if this application were their magnum opus.  The desired result is to create a component or software that is of a qualitative order of magnitude greater than expected; but not to overstep a given systems requirements.
 
Institute leadership

For the want of a nail the kingdom was lost ~ King Richard III

The nature of leadership according to Maslow’s hierarchy is to ensure that the needs of their employees are met.[ix] With respect to formal management techniques these include the need for safety; and the need to have meaningful work to do; as well as the need to be compensated.
Eric Schmidt led Google for a number of years on the basis of ideas outlined in Messick’s paper on the Psychological Exchange between Leaders and followers[x]. Messick defines leaders as those responsible for answering questions “Where are we going?”,“What are our objectives?” And “What are we trying to Achieve?”  The former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welsh has 25 lessons and a book on leadership that has been translated to over 17 languages entitled “Jack: Straight from the Gut”.
Deming stated that supervision should be improved and that project leaders should help their team also to ensure that developers are adequately trained in unit testing and that they can and know how to apply statistical methods such as root cause analysis.
On how to institute leadership; Deming demonstrated that the effect of “Culture” on a given project can be the difference between its success or its failure. Ultimately leaders do nothing more than empower their sub-ordinates to do great work.
As stated in the previous Denver International airport study leaders should be adept at both risk management and supervisory and executive decisions to limit scope and to ensure that the project objectives are well defined as re the roles for each of those within the development team to ensure that each individual may contribute effectively to the given project; as these two aspects of feature bloat and scope creep can cause a software development project to fail both financially and literally.
References


[i] Robert B. Austenfeld, Jr ( International Quality Federation, 2001) W. Edwards Deming: the Story of a Truly Remarkable Person [Online] PDF Document, Available From: http://www.iqfnet.org/Ff4203.pdf (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
[ii] N.A. (Wikimedia, n.d.) Wikinary definition for Principle [Online] World Wide Web, Available from: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/principle (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
[iii] Antonietta, Campos ( Black, 1987) “Marginainalist Economics”, The New Palgrave A Dictionary of Economics, V. 3, P. 320 [Online] World Wide Web; Available From: http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/ (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
[iv] Livaldis, L (UoL, 2011) SQA: Software Quality Assurance [Online] PDF Document, Available from: https://elearning.uol.ohecampus.com/bbcswebdav/xid-209439_4 (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
[v] Boehm, B (ACM SIGSOFT, 1986) A spiral model of Software development and enhancement [Online] PDF Document Available from: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=12944.12948 (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
[vi] N.A. (CMMI, 2008) Capability Maturity Model Integration [Online] World Wide Web, Available From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_Integration (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
[vii] N.A. (Calleam Consulting Ltd, 2008) Case Study – Denver International Airport Baggage Handeling System – An illustration of ineffectual decision making – Why Technology Project Fail [Online] PDF Document, Available from: http://calleam.com/WTPF/wp-content/uploads/articles/DIABaggage.pdf (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
[viii] Kokoro Shirai, Hiroyaso Iso, Hideki Fukuda, Yasuhir Toyoda, Toshio Takatorige, Tatara Kozo; (PubMed, BioMed Central, 2006) Factors Associated with “Ikigai” among member of a public temporary employment agency for seniors (Silver Human Resources Centre) In Japan; Gender Diffrences [Online] World Wide Web, Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1450260/ (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
[ix] Simons, Janet A; Irwin, Donald B.; Drinnnien, Beverly A. (West Publisishing Company, New York 1987) Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs [Online] World Wide Web, Available from: http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/maslow.htm (Accessed on February 3rd 2011)
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