How to Enforce The Quality Bar

A manager’s worst mistake is prioritizing quantity over quality. If you’re too focused on productivity or unit amount, you’ll create a careless team.

Careless teams aren’t concerned about providing value. Instead, they want to produce as many units as possible.

This is problematic because these units are usually low-quality and full of errors. Also, they make it hard for downstream teams to repair the damage — creating mediocre products and unhappy customers.

At RemoteU, we promote quality over quantity. Meaning, it’s better to have a few high-quality units than several mediocre ones.

The Quality Bar is Your Most Important Target

As a manager, your goal is to help your team only deliver units that satisfy the quality bar.

The quality bar is the standard in which a unit or output completes an objective and becomes high-quality.

For example, if you’re in customer support, your quality bar could be a ticket where a customer expresses satisfaction or gives a 5-star rating. Units that achieve this are high-quality.

Your duty is to evaluate all of your team’s units to determine if they’re satisfactory. This means understanding that you won’t produce many units until they become high-quality.

As you manage your team, quality is your first priority. Productivity is second.

First Week of Team Management Timeline

Your main goal is to enforce your team’s quality bar. TIP: If you don’t have it, ask your VP for an objective quality bar. You’re not responsible for creating it because it must be given to you.

However, If a quality bar exists, but it’s not documented, you must write it down. Good quality bars are objective and recorded.

Here’s the timeline of your first few days as manager:

  • Day 1: Understand the current quality bar. Begin Gemba Walks and Daily Check-in Chats.

  • Day 2: Personally review every single unit for quality. Do Daily CiCs and Gemba walks.

  • Day 3: Personally review every single unit for quality. Do Daily CiCs and Gemba walks.

  • Day 4: Personally review every single unit for quality. Do Daily CiCs and Gemba walks.

  • Day 5: Personally review every single unit for quality. Do a Rank and Review based on quality

How to Start Enforcing the Quality Bar

There are different types of quality bars: external, internal, and input. However, you’ll most likely start with the internal quality bar for your team. You’ll find this bar’s documentation publicly displayed in Confluence or a similar place.

If you don’t have an internal quality bar, you must prepare to reorganize your team to focus on quality since they haven’t done it already.

Review Every Unit for Quality

Once you understand your internal quality bar, review all of your team’s units and evaluate them against the bar.

This means analyzing every unit, not just a sample.

Spend about 8 hours evaluating this output and grading it’s relative to the quality bar document. There are 2 examples of this document at the end of this chapter. You can use these spreadsheets as a template.

Perform Daily Check-In Chats and Rank and Reviews

Check-in chats are a great opportunity to learn more about the status of your team’s performance. You should lead these chats with quality based questions like, “How many of your units met the internal quality bar yesterday?

Next, review your team’s output against the quality bar and coach each member on how to improve it.

After a week of quality-based check-in chats, perform a rank and review of your team based on the internal FTAR. You should categorize your team into three groups:

  • Meets Quality Bar - Perfect or near-perfect performer. Could still benefit from coaching.

  • Coach - Not a top performer but a week or less of coaching will improve their skills.

  • Send to RemoteU - Needs more than a week of extensive and systematic coaching.

TIP: See Chapters Rank and Review and Daily Check In Chats for more information

(RemoteU) What to do when there is no defined IQB or no quality enforcement process

If a quality bar or quality enforcement process does not exist, the manager builds a quality bar and enforces the quality themselves within the allotted EQB time on ManagerU calendar.

When It’s Time to Create a Separate Quality Team

Before you can create a separate quality team, you must complete a series of steps.

Confirm that the Quality Bar is Correct

First, the quality bar has to be at the right level. If it’s not, it must be changed. This is because manipulating the bar with a separate team will take too much time.

You’ll have too many people to train and adjust.

You must show that the quality bar is already correct and can be enforced with the single manager before delegating it to a second person.

Already Performed a Rank and Review

You must have already done a rank and review for your team. You’ve divided your team and now only have great people who can deliver units that meet the quality bar.

You can have team members who produce high-quality at low volume and time. However, you can’t have anyone that produces many units at low quality.

Prove That You Don’t Have Enough Time

Lastly, you need to show that you don’t have enough hours in the week to enforce the quality team by yourself.

As a manager, your main priority is coaching the IC’s and enforcing a quality-centric culture. All other activities aren’t as important.

Use Top Performers to Create a Separate Team

If you and your team satisfy these criteria, you can build a separate quality enforcement team. This team should only contain top performers within your existing team.

To start, take this person with the highest quality and discuss their performance. Ask them to independently rank their output with a yes or no on if it passes the quality bar.

Compare each other’s passes or failures and work together to explain any differences. Do this every day until the two of you are calibrated. Then, move this top performer to the separate quality team.

Repeat this process with the next top performer on your team. Continue doing this until the quality team has enough experience to quality check 100% of their team’s output.

How to Ensure That You Have the Right Quality Bar

To know if you have the right quality bar, rank all units against the bar. Then, take the worst acceptable unit and ask a customer if it provided the right value.

If the customer doesn’t believe that this unit provided the value they wanted, then you’re not setting the right quality bar.

If you don’t have the right quality bar, you need to discuss it with your VP about changing it. In this situation, there are two approaches.

The first is to bring it to the right level immediately. The second approach is to improve the bar over time. The first approach is much more effective than the second one.

Changes Make a Difference

The best WSPro managers always try to set the quality bar at the necessary level. If you’re great at WSPro, it will only take one iteration to set your internal quality bar to the right level.

When you enforce it, your customers will receive their expected value.

If you’re struggling, then it will take many iterations to set it at the right level. Many managers make the mistake of improving unimportant iterations to replace setting the quality bar right.

That’s because these small changes are easier than figuring out the core problem and fixing it.

To set your quality bar, you can add, remove, simplify, or improve the current quality bar components.

To start, copy the current internal quality bar into a spreadsheet and put each quality bar component in its own row. Then, document your recommendations next to the old one, explaining the ways you’re improving it.

Below is an example from Eng.DevSpacesImport - some components were added, removed, and improved.

Automation is Best

The best quality enforcement process is an automated process. Every team should strive to automate the quality bar. Although you can’t automate everything, find subsets that can.

The next step is utilizing a separate quality team. This is a different team made up of people who aren’t “doing the work.”

They can also be tasked with automating the quality bar by writing automation specs. Important note: while you are designing the right process, you still need to enforce each unit.

Important Decisions

1. Peer reviews aren’t a good strategy to evaluate the quality of work or units. Yes, IC’s should be encouraged to check their work against the quality bar. But, you should rely on automation or a separate team to enforce the bar.

2. This chapter assumes you’re an expert on what your team needs to deliver. If you’re a generalist and need another person to determine quality, then you can’t be a team leader until the quality bar is working.

Generalists should only focus on enforcing the quality bar, not creating it. Generalists don’t define these bars, they enforce them. If you’re a manager who has suggestions for the quality bar, recommend it to your VP.

3. Sometimes a team will achieve a “perfect” or 100% quality. This usually happens if a unit is counted as done once it reaches a quality level that requires several iterations with a customer.

Because no team can achieve 100% quality, this is a bad standard to achieve. You don’t want to improve your quality at the expense of the customer.

In these scenarios, you should move the quality measurement to FTAR (First Time Acceptance Rate) which will show how often your team delivers quality for the first time.

4. Be skeptical of 100% quality. Inexperienced managers naively believe their team has ‘nailed it’ or ‘there is literally no other way to increase quality.’

Think of it this way: 100% quality would mean there is not a single team in the world who is better than yours. It means if Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Reed Hastings looked at your team, they would be floored.

When you have 100% quality, it means you haven’t set the bar high enough. If it would ‘blow your mind’ to identify a way to increase quality for your team, unblow your mind.

How to Fix your Input Quality Bar (only to be read after your internal quality bar is extremely high)

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