A BUNFIGHT OVER QUALITY

A RANA Case Study – A Medium-Sized Software Organization

The Story

Dag Holmer and Grace Field were having a “heck of a bun-fight”. Grace was the Director of the Software Development Division at AccuNet Limited, a local, medium-sized high-tech firm supplying e-product components to other companies. Dag was the relatively new Executive Director of Special Projects hired two months ago as an organizational trouble-shooter by the Senior Management of AccuNet to bring improvements to productivity and to the bottom line.

Recently, Dag had pumped some information out of a junior analyst over a drink and pieced together a picture of what he called incompetence in Grace’s shop. There were programming errors all over the place. Some products should never have been released. He checked with marketing and found that there had been some complaints by Accunet’s corporate clients regarding the quality of the applications supplied to them.

Meanwhile, Grace was having a hard time. She was one of the original people brought into the company due to her uncanny ability to conceive a product and then bring it to market swiftly, albeit sometimes imperfectly. She had made the company a great deal of money with her “Quick and Dirty” approach and her reading of the market was that AccuNet’s highly specialized and skilled customers were more interested in getting the latest stuff than worrying over a few glitches. She was really discouraged by Dag’s attack on her people, her integrity and her contributions to the Company.

Other Divisional Directors were starting to become nervous as well. The Marketing people felt awful that they had “snitched” on Grace and were hastily covering their tracks. The Director of Hardware Development had ordered his people not to speak with Dag under any circumstances and the CEO was becoming concerned that he had let a monster loose in his organization.

The Intervention

The CEO was in touch with RANA to see what could be done to “salvage” the situation. The RANA Process Leaders:

Facilitated a work session of Senior Management to diagnose the reasons for Dag’s original hiring;
Facilitated the next work session of Senior Management, with Grace and Dag as observers to establish a more appropriate decision framework for improving productivity and profits while reconciling opposing viewpoints;
Facilitated a workshop of Software Development and Marketing to establish a long term plan for improving software development at Accunet;
Re-focussed Dag’s role to that of process consultant, i.e., to that of helper, by which he might extend to Grace the support needed to ensure that products were consistently of high quality, rather than undermining her operation;
Provided coaching to both Grace and Dag in effective Process Leadership behaviours and values orientation.