Personal Blogs

Author

Article

Year

Read

Heston & Phifer

The multiple quality models paradox: how much ‘best practice’ is just enough?

2011

12-Aug-12

Key words

Quality management, Standards, Quality models,

Summarizing comments

The title of this article (Heston & Phifer, 2011) left me with the expectations of an academic paper into a struggle between standardization and formality vs. flexibility and speed to best meet current and future business objectives. The article does not meet these expectations and is predominantly an outline of characteristics of typical standards / models / best practices used within the software industry (ISO 9001, CMMI, ITIL, ISO 27001, eSCM-SP, Six Sigma, Lean).

Heston and Phifer argue that implementing one or more of these should not be a goal on its own and claims that many organizations are putting effort in implementation of these without taking full advantage of such implementation. They encourage the purposeful application of parts of these models/standards to best meet the organization’s needs.

They are using the terms ‘Process DNA’ and ‘Quality Genes’ as building blocks of each standard/model and compare how each standard/model focusses on each of these.  I don’t know how they came to the selection of the Reference model capabilities to map the ‘Q-genes’ of each standard/model.  The explanation provided is that it represents an’ initial, high-level view of many elements that currently are incorporated into the reference models and standards in scope for this paper’. The paper suggests that this list could be easily expanded with other comparison criteria, attuned to the specific needs from the organization.

The article provides 4 different scenario’s where different type of organizations are selecting different best practices from different model/standards based upon their culture, their needs (I skipped these scenarios; I can see the point).

The message of the article is a little lost in the amount of tables delivering the comparisons. The tables are poorly positioned and also poorly introduced. At a number of occasions, I had to go backward and forward to understand why the table was there.  Their content, however, the comparisons of the different models/standards is useful for my project and for my normal work too.

Paragraph 6 provides a nice overview of common challenges and risks when pursuing process improvements and suggests mitigations.

· Lack of focus on people change management

· Lack of skills in process improvements

· Belief in silver bullet

· Belief, compromises and conflicts on what is enough (actually what triggered me reading this article; the authors introduce the 80/20 rule and suggest that you move to maintenance mode once you have reached your business objective)

· Being model centric

This article feels as a rush-rush job, insufficiently filtering the information required for the reader to take in the case; it just uses everything available. Valid points, but not really contributing to the case (for instance this list of common challenges and risks with their mitigations). The conclusion is not really following the line set out in the article. The conclusion suddenly mentions the costs of implementation of standards as a major issue. I do not disagree; I just don’t think it should be an important part of the conclusion if it hasn’t been a major part of the article.

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1. Skim read and summarize

12-Aug-12

Closed

2.