Improving Product Reliability and Software Quality, 2nd Edition

13Why Hardware Reliability and Software Quality Improvement Efforts Fail

After blending the reliability processes and tools into your system, you can still fail, even with the best intentions. There are other problems that you will encounter that can stifle or seriously block your effort. In Chapter 2, we discussed the barriers to implementing the reliability process. Here, we consider how poor execution or poor follow‐up can cause the reliability effort to break down.

13.1 Lack of Commitment to the Reliability Process

Commitment to a task doesn't guarantee success, but the lack of commitment is certainly a guarantee of failure. Commitment to a reliability program must come from the top management. But commitment by itself still will not guarantee success. Top management must understand what it is that they're tasking their managers to do. It is a high‐level understanding of the elements of the reliability process, the cost, the requirements, the time it will take to fully implement, and what to expect from the effort. The implementers of the reliability effort must truly believe that top management has resources committed to their success. Management's everyday actions, such as signing purchase orders for equipment and materials, give believability to managers' commitment. They must recognize that the costs to implement reliability are easily calculated; yet the short‐term results of all these actions are much more difficult to measure.

The shortsighted view of commitment ...