Chief Quality Officer

The CQO. It’s what you are - like it or not - whether you asked for it or not.

Just like the Chief Operating Officer keeps the company chugging along, just like the CEO (presumably) sets the company’s course, you directly impact, create and manage quality every day - whether you’re a senior manager or an entry-level tester. But the challenge is, as I mentioned earlier, you can’t assure quality. You don’t have the power of a CEO.

But then again, you do. Tom Peters talks about treating yourself - regardless of your job description or rank - as your own “PSF” or Professional Services Firm (PDF here). That makes total sense because you, essentially, are the boss of you. You dictate the quality of your work. You’re the CEO of the work you produce, the footprint you leave on your company, and the influence you have over others (as it relates to evangelizing quality).

So this means you can’t play the victim. I’m not saying you are, but it’s a typical feeling in the QA world to feel hamstrung by short-sighted executives, limited resources, and unreasonable schedules (especially when everyone’s looking to you to “assure” quality). In my decade-plus run in the QA trenches this is pretty much the norm when you look at it from the typical perspective of QA being at the bottom of the food chain. It can wear people down and make them feel powerless to work under the restrictions that often result from resource constraints and internal politics.

But what if you treated things from a different perspective - instead of seeing yourself as an employee (tester), or a manager (test lead/QA manager), what if you viewed yourself as the Chief Quality Officer of your own PSF - and handled your workload accordingly?

As the boss of your own PSF, “assuring quality” is equivalent to assuring your continued employment with a client - you’ve got to give them value greater than what you’re extracting from their payroll department. So as the head honcho of your own one-man/woman PSF, you have three possible avenues to take to add quality to the development process for your customer (your employer).

The “I”s Have It - 3 Roles of the CQO
As a CQO, you add value to your customers when you do one of the following:

• Inspect. In other words, this is testing. Either you do it yourself, or you assign it to testers under your care and feeding. This also includes making the tests better as often as you can.

• Infuse. This means adding value by improving the process. This happens at a higher level than testing and requires either some position of power (e.g., being a manager) or the savvy ability to …

• Influence. This is the big one. This is where you work to educate people outside the QA department to adopt improvements to the development cycle that make sense. But because people are people, you often have to do it in a way that makes them think they came up with idea. As someone once said, “Diplomacy is the art of letting somebody else have your way.”

I’ve seen many people locked into the first stage of QA - the role of testing (and nothing else). There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, because every Quality Services department needs people to, well, test the hell out of software. But to truly take on the role of the CQO, you’ve got to do more.

Most QA managers I’ve seen understand the concept of Infusing. It’s part of their role to make the process better. Their skill set allows them to infuse the process with new energy, new strategies that make the test cycle simply run better. Sadly, though, many managers stop at just improving the test process.

Getting Your Company Under The Influence
That’s why becoming an influencer is so important. A savvy CQO needs to learn the needs of the departments around him/her and see where they can help them work together. In most companies different departments develop adversarial relationships because each has its own agenda, its own pressures, its own constraints. On top of that, they have their own history of strife among members of each department. How many decisions have you seen made (or shot down) for political reasons?

A good CQO will subtly work to reconnect departments with each other again and dissolve the adversarial relationship. And that leads to a better development effort, and ultimately a better product for you to test. And how to do that is fodder for a whole slew of other articles. For now just chew on the three “I”s and ask yourself how you would approach “QA” different if you saw yourself as the CQO of your own PSF. OK? We’ll pick up on this again soon.

Till then, focus on adding massive value, wherever you are.

- Dave Navarro