Quality Over Speed in Project Management: Striking the Right Balance for Success
In the fast-paced world of project management, the pressure to deliver results quickly can be overwhelming. Projects often come with tight deadlines and high expectations for swift completion. While speed is undoubtedly important, an unwavering commitment to quality is equally — if not more — critical for long-term success. Today, I decided to emphasize once more the significance of prioritizing quality over speed in project management and how striking the right balance is the key to achieving exceptional outcomes.
First of all, what is the “Allure of Speed?” In a competitive business environment, the allure of completing projects swiftly is undeniable. Organizations strive to stay ahead of the curve, meet market demands promptly, and gain a competitive edge. However, the pursuit of speed should not come at the expense of quality. Rushed projects can result in a myriad of issues, including subpar deliverables, increased errors, and compromised stakeholder satisfaction. How many of you thought about the Project management triangle? Yes, exactly, this affects any component of Project management triangle as the changes in one constraint will cause the others to adjust accordingly. Have you heard of this described before as as “Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two”?
Lets walk through together what might be “The Downside of Sacrificing Quality”
1. Reputation Damage:
Delivering a project quickly but with compromised quality can tarnish the reputation of both the team and the organization. Negative perceptions resulting from poor-quality outcomes can have lasting consequences.
2. Stakeholder Dissatisfaction:
Stakeholders, whether internal or external, prioritize the quality of deliverables. Sacrificing quality for speed can lead to dissatisfaction, strained relationships, and a loss of trust.
3. Impact on upcoming project phases:
Overall delivery of low-quality work can affect the teams’ credibility and diminish opportunities for maintaining quality in project’s future phases. We should always remember that organizations value consistency in quality over time. And here goes the last but the most important one:
4. Increased Costs:
Cutting corners to meet tight deadlines may lead to costly rework. Fixing errors or addressing quality issues after project completion often incurs more expenses than getting it right the first time. This results in technical debt which directly affect the cost of the project. The biggest cost on a software project is people. Paying people to build your software is by far the most expensive outlay.
Technical debt?
Even if you google, it will give the following statement “Technical debt is a common concept in software development, where team members delay features and functionality, cut corners, or settle for suboptimal performance to push the project forward. It occurs as the result of a “build now, fix later” mentality. In other words, it’s the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over quality code.But let me explain with another great example that I came across recently:
"If you run a commercial kitchen and you only ever cook food because selling cooked food is your business. If you never cleaned the dishes, never scrubbed the grill, never organized the freezer, the health inspector will shut your sheet down pretty quickly. And if nothing is done about it, it will come to a point where the kitchen starts failing to produce edible meals. Generally you can either convince decision makers that cleaning the kitchen is more profitable in the long run, or you can dust off your resume, and get out before it burns down”.
As Ward Cunningham once said , the co-author of Manifesto for Agile Software Development, “If you develop a program for a long period of time by only adding features, but never reorganizing it to reflect your understanding of those features, then eventually that program simply does not contain any understanding, and all efforts to work on it take longer and longer”What about the Pressure to deliver fast? Is this a good approach?
Encouraging quicker delivery can be achieved through the application of pressure, but this approach comes with consequences. The imposition of pressure and a sense of urgency often prompts individuals to take shortcuts. While it may create the appearance of accelerated progress, the actual outcome is a decline in the quality of results. Subsequently, this can result in delays and a decrease in overall efficiency. Moreover, individuals subjected to prolonged periods of pressure are likely to experience burnout, leading to having the idea of leaving the organization.
Here are my tips for striking the right balance:
Stop to evaluate
Take time to stop, evaluate, or reflect on our work. In a go-go-go product cycle, that loss of understanding begins to create problems that have literal and figurative costs to the business. Have regular technical meetings with team members to correctly assess and evaluate the technical drawbacks of the project, sort out the pain points, come up with proper and validated tech solutions, set a timeframe to fix them.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast
Go slow but steady. Effectiveness leads to efficiency. To address this issue, take a measured and consistent approach. Investing in quality upfront minimizes costs over time. By prioritizing quality, you cultivate confidence, ultimately enhancing speed. Sometimes teams decide to intentionally do something quickly as a temporary compromise because they need to deliver to market. But as project manager you need to ensure that they also consider how long it will take to fix that quick implementation.
Refactor/rewrite your code
If you leave the technical debt to grow without tending to fix it regularly, there will come a point where development on the app will get to a screeching halt. Every feature will take a very long time to ship out to customers, no early feedback is assured and of course. This is when people start saying that they need to do a really big refactor or even worse, a rewrite of the whole code base. This will come at a pain, this will come at a cost. But if the team needs to do this, then give them time to do it earlier in the project.
Conclusion:
If we revisit the initial theme about the project management triangle, which involves time, budget, and quality, optimizing two aspects doesn’t necessarily mean sacrificing the third. How can we achieve success in all three? The solution is straightforward: prioritize quality.While this may appear counterintuitive, studies indicate that engineering teams that prioritize quality are the most efficient. By emphasizing quality, we are essentially future-proofing our application. In this context, “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast” goes perfectly well with the familiar saying that holds true: ‘slow and steady wins the race”.