This isn’t really a response to anything, just a story I remembered today.

Years ago, I was working at my first IT BA job at a major bank. The management team of the division had been frustrated with a number of projects that had gone well over planned release dates due to quality problems and bugs. I was probably a contributor to the problem in that I had been finding a lot of bugs. But I digress…

Anyway, the managers had a bright idea. They decided to roll out, with great fanfare, a new program. We were going to embrace a culture of zero defects! So they get up, and give presentations, and speeches, and then it’s time for us to ask questions. And someone in the audience (not me) asks the obvious question:

“So does that mean that we don’t put new releases into production if they have outstanding bugs? Because Project X is going to have to go live soon and I don’t think we can fix everything by (date expensive marketing campaign has promised and which has been committed to upper management).”

So the managers hemmed, and hawed, and allowed as that there might be exceptions in special cases, and that was pretty much the last we heard of zero defects.

Now, I don’t think that there’s anything unusual about the quiet abandoning of improvement programs when it becomes clear that there’s short-term pain involved. I’m just amazed that it was so open. I suspect if Project X had been further away from its release date, we’d have seen a bit more hypocrisy and we’d have played a game of defining whatever we did as having zero defects.

Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Professional Development