Strategies and Tactics: Documentation First Drafts and Planning the Work
Improvement Strategies and Career Tactics for Design and Construction
Main Points
Use the dictate function on your phone to write work instructions.
Quality is a result of planning.
1: Dictate Your Work Instructions
Quality is difficult to understand. The wording used to describe what to do in our manuals, work instructions, and books isn’t clear for everyone. This contributes to quality programs being “complicated,” or “cumbersome,” another task teams “don’t have time for”.
Seth Godin recently wrote about using a digital tape recorder to record yourself speaking, where the transcript then becomes the first draft of your nonfiction book (click here for the full article). Apply this tactic to your quality program documents.
Open an email or other note taking app on your phone. (I user Evernote.)
Use the dictate function to record yourself explaining the process and how to use it.
Your transcript becomes the official work instruction for the process, task, or program - after you’ve cleaned it up. (Also see Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World for methods to improve your program documents.)
2. Quality is the Result of Planning the Work
I wonder if isolated quality programs exist because we stopped planning the work. To use Bent Flyvbjerg's words, we can't help but rush in and get going.
There's an industry misconception that we must manage quality processes and systems separately. This prevents teams from planning and instead pushes them towards complying with corporate mandates. There's a close alignment here with quality being an "extra thing that we don't have time for." Quality itself can't actually be managed.
Remove the word "quality" from the quality-related tasks and processes. These tasks are not only contractually required, but tasks that we should be doing anyway. The planning effort helps every aspect of a project be more effective - not just quality.