Are we marketing the right metrics?

 

Recently, I've been experiencing frequent brief loss of Internet connectivity issues at home. I live in a major urban area, no internal or external home renovations have happened which would affect cabling, and my cable modem was recently swapped. Thankfully, the technician who swapped the modem did provide me with his mobile number and recommended that I call him if I had further issues within a few weeks.

We have all heard that the Internet is becoming a critical utility and hence we should demand the same reliability as we do with power, water or our telephone dial tone. While this is a reasonable expectation, few Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have focused on this in their marketing campaigns to the personal market. Commercial customers are a different story - they enjoy real SLAs but at a higher cost. Most of the ISPs who service residential customers will hype their transmission speed or capacity in their advertising. While those are important, guaranteed up time would be a more welcome benefit in the long run, and would likely contribute to greater customer loyalty. ISPs are under pressure to scale their infrastructure to support greater speeds at lower costs, but the side effect of this "arms race" might be reliability.

This situation brought to mind the challenges we face when communicating delivery metrics as part of an agile transformation.

Many of the leaders I've worked with focus on schedule metrics: reducing time to market, lead time, time between releases, and so on. While these are important, an overemphasis on reducing lead time may unconsciously encourage delivery teams to kick quality concerns down the road. Having effective Definition of Done working agreements can help, but these can also be diluted to favor speed over quality. Defect reporting and customer satisfaction surveys provide opportunities to identify whether there is an unhealthy focus on delivering faster, but these are lagging indicators.

This is why it is so important that the communication campaign supporting the transformation, including the sound bites from top-level executives, reflect an equal footing for speed AND quality. And mid-level managers need to walk this talk in their daily interactions with their teams.

Don't sacrifice quality at the altar of speed.