I am working on a project these days with a lot of effort around balancing speed of delivery with level of testing, design iterations, and QA.
The easy way to say that is: What is the right balance of speed versus perfection of output?
There is parity-of-knowledge in our world; if you use available resources you can know what your competition knows. Quality has been a cost of entry for decades. Even innovation it could be argued is now much more of a price to complete.
So what is left to leverage? How to edge the competition? Just a few thoughts:
1) Radical innovation. Everyone focuses on innovation but not everyone can find a real breakthrough or has the nerve to take the risk.
2) Rapid, incremental, innovation. Google uses this with their constant flow of beta products and versions.
I think the second option is more attainable for many enterprises. Here are a few points in that direction:
- Go to market when you have a core concept. Don’t wait to flesh out every conceivable issue.
- When to pull the trigger on a program or product? As soon as you think you will not have negative impact.
- Build for change by using the most open technologies you can.
- Listen to customer reaction as much as you can via measurement, discussion, and monitoring.
- Iterate often.
There is a version of this approach that will be the "perfect speed" for your team.
There is much more here to explore.
J
2 comments:
I agree with you on that. Remember when I was telling you about W Edwards Deming's 14 points? Check it out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_Deming
I believe this man truly understands how to increase productivity and quality simultaneously. These 14 points can dramatically impact our output if we adhere to them. I actually started working on them in my internet marketing business and the results have been astonishing. Check out www.simpletiger.com now compared to about a month ago. A month ago it was a little wireframe HTML site with nothing special, and now I'm getting more visitors through interactivity online due to applying these points holistically. Let me know what you think! You also reminded me to write a post about these points. Thanks J!
Thanks Jeremiah. I guess the only point I would make is that in the digital creative space it is some times more important to provide general guidelines and environments that foster and encourage innovation and efficiency rather than providing hard mechanisms. I think Deming was focused a lot on manufacturing and in our space it is a real balancing act between methodology and creativity.
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