Domain
Operations and Quality
How the work is planned, sequenced, measured, and corrected — and whether quality is something the team protects or something they ship around.
Operations and Quality is the domain in which the gap between what we say and what we do is the most public. A team can say it values quality and still ship work that is not yet good, because the planning architecture made it cheaper to ship than to delay.
Most frustrations in this domain are not about laziness. They are about the operational choice the team is being asked to make every week — between what is on the roadmap and what is on their conscience — and the silent reward structure that always favours the roadmap.
Removing the architecture means making the trade-off explicit: this work shipped because we chose speed; here is what we chose not to do. Saying that out loud, on the record, is what gives the team back its agency over quality.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →
Diagnostic
If your team's quality conversations only happen after a customer escalation, and never on the planning side of the cycle, you have an Operations and Quality architecture in which quality is an apology, not a constraint.
Run the diagnostic
Explore this domain in depth once you have a workspace.
Deep link: /field-guide/operations-quality
Source: Why Your Best People Stop Trying. Dr. Tim Hough.