Quality Archives - Page 8 of 19 - understand-culture

SMART Goals

In November 1981 George T. Doran published a short article in Management Review. Its title was “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives.” His five criteria were Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic and Time-related. The letters have changed over time. A common version today reads Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

A federal regulation sets the rules for a child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) in special education. The IEP must contain “a statement of measurable annual goals.” It must also say how “the child’s progress toward meeting the annual goals” will be measured. A guide for parents explains why: “The IEP team must be able to tell if the goal has been reached.”

Performance Standards for Federal Employees

Federal law tells most U.S. government agencies how to judge their employees. Under 5 U.S.C. § 4302, each appraisal system must set “performance standards which will, to the maximum extent feasible, permit the accurate evaluation of job performance on the basis of objective criteria.” These criteria “may include the extent of courtesy demonstrated to the public.”

Each employee must be told the standards and “the critical elements of the employee’s position” at the beginning of each appraisal period. The Office of Personnel Management tells agencies to “establish clear, measurable expectations at the start of the performance cycle.” It also tells them to require sign-off on the performance plan “within the first 30-45 days of the cycle.” The law asks agencies to “encourage employee participation in establishing performance standards.”

Gold Plating

Project managers have a name for giving a customer more than the plan calls for. They call it gold plating. Wikipedia sums up the standard project management guide, the PMBOK, this way: gold plating “means the addition of any feature not considered in the original scope plan.”

In 2002 PM Network, the magazine of the Project Management Institute, discussed the practice. It wrote that giving the customer extras, such as bonus functions or better components, “usually is frowned upon in project management circles.” It quoted an exam guide by Rita Mulcahy: “Often such additions are included based on the project team’s impression of what the customer would like.”

The same article questioned the rule. Its subtitle reads: “A certain amount of ‘gold-plating’ in software development projects actually may produce more satisfied customers.”

The Rubric

Carnegie Mellon University’s teaching center lists several reasons why students complain about grades. One is: “The performance criteria that are used to distinguish among different grades are not clear.” One piece of its advice is to “explicitly identify what distinguishes basic performance from exemplary on the assignment statement.”

The tool for this is a rubric handed out with the assignment. With it, the center says, students “know the target they are aiming for.” They also “are less likely to be surprised.”

Conformance to Requirements

In his 1979 book Quality Is Free, Philip Crosby defined quality as “conformance to requirements.”

In a 1995 interview with IndustryWeek he explained the idea. “Conventionally, quality is always looked at as goodness, as gold-plating,” he said. But “you can’t manage with goodness as your definition of quality.” Instead: “It means doing exactly what you said you were going to do — that’s really the definition of quality.”

Shakedown Cruise

A new Navy ship goes on a shakedown cruise. Merriam-Webster defines a shakedown as “a testing under operating conditions of something new (such as a ship) for possible faults and defects and for familiarizing the operators with it.”

The Navy then schedules time to fix what the test found. Its maintenance manual defines a Post Shakedown Availability as a shipyard period “assigned to correct deficiencies found during the shakedown cruise or to accomplish other authorized improvements.” The carrier USS Gerald R. Ford was commissioned in July 2017. In July 2018 it began a planned 12-month post-shakedown availability, combined with other shipyard work.

From Strawman to Steelman

In 1975 the Department of Defense started a “Common High Order Language” program. A working group set out to define what one programming language for the military should do. Its first draft of requirements, in April 1975, was called Strawman.

“The requirements were widely distributed for comment throughout the military and civil communities.” Each round produced a firmer version: Woodenman, Tinman, Ironman and finally Steelman, released in June 1978. The programming language built to these requirements became Ada.

The term is still used in American business. A “straw man proposal” is “a brainstormed simple draft proposal intended to generate discussion of its disadvantages.”

Posted Before Review

arXiv, the online archive for scientific papers, received its first submission on August 14, 1991. Paul Ginsparg started it. He was then a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He wanted to automate the sharing of physics papers with a mailing list.

Many researchers now post manuscripts there before they send them to a journal. In August 2016 the journal Nature Physics wrote that manuscripts were being posted and “feedback from the community” received “before submission to a journal.” By then arXiv held more than 1.16 million papers. The Nature journals encourage authors to post their manuscripts before submission.

The Hamilton Mixtape

On May 12, 2009, Lin-Manuel Miranda performed at a White House evening of poetry and music. He said he was working on a “hip-hop album” about “the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop … Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton.” The audience, including President Obama, laughed. “You laugh, but it’s true!” Miranda said. Then he performed the opening number. At the time it was called “The Hamilton Mixtape.”

The work kept developing in stages. Lincoln Center presented a preview on January 11, 2010. A workshop at Vassar College in the summer of 2013 covered the first act and three songs from the second. Hamilton opened at the Public Theater on February 17, 2015, and on Broadway on August 6, 2015.

Rated Weak

“The Seinfeld Chronicles” first aired on NBC on July 5, 1989. NBC’s research department rated the pilot “weak.” Its memo said: “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.” It added: “You can’t get too excited about going to the Laundromat.”

NBC still ordered four more episodes. The executive Rick Ludwin “killed one of the Bob Hope specials” to pay for them. Another three years passed before Seinfeld became “a Top 5 ratings smash.” TV Guide reported in 2014 that it had earned $4 billion worldwide.