The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

4.3. To Improve Quality, Focus on Productivity

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that your IT group produce high-quality software. Every bug in software used by your business is both a problem and a symptom of a larger problem.

Defective software can cause anything from mild irritation on the part of a few users to catastrophic system failures.

In the new, open world, any number of outside entities may rely on your software to achieve their goals. I am talking about your customers, suppliers, partners, investors, and the government for starters.

Your software is going to interact with theirs. If the software that comes out of your IT group is of poor quality, you will be gumming up their works as well as your own. The quality standards by which you will be measured are going up, and they will continue to go up indefinitely.

But here is a paradox. If you want to improve quality, you need to focus on productivity, not quality. If you focus on quality, you will kill productivity and lose both. You need, instead, to focus on getting more work out of your development team.

If the team is more productive, its members will produce higher quality output. They will spend less time fixing bugs, which is expensive, and more time doing original design work, which is where innovation comes from. This is counterintuitive. Let me explain.