Quality Circle in Engineering, Action from Data

** Introduction **
This works for program offices under a waterfall model or phase gate.
It’s ideal for projects with distinct phases
And the same set of milestones.
** Objective **
The objective is to improve the process through quality circles
The key ideas here are:
Establish an early warning system for milestones to watch.
At any deviation ask “what does it take to bring this back on track”
After any milestone not okay, initiate a quality circle.
And, when things go really well, propagate best practices.
** Here are the final thoughts. **
1. Show the quality dashboards in a prominent location. Think about the scoreboard in a sports stadium. Everyone must be able to see the score and make sense of it in a brief moment.
2. The knowledge must be easy to find. We need to verify that the right people are consuming it to produce better engineering quality.
3. Balance the focus on fixing today’s troubles works against learning from the past and looking rigorously for future risks.
4. Ensure that one team is learning across from another team, be it parallel across ongoing teams or from one generation to the next future programs.