Are Your Expectations Too Low?

Growing up I came to expect certain things as “normal.” These were events or conditions that were routinely part of my life. I didn’t know anything different and besides, I figured they were out of my control anyway. Well, now that I’ve “grown up” - and I use that term cautiously since I’m not all that sure I ever really grew up - I no longer want my pork chops broiled to shoe leather toughness, I expect air conditioning in the warm weather months, I DO want cruise control on my car and it’s OK to have a phone and television in multiple rooms my home. I also expect a certain level of service for businesses I frequent and I have become addicted to instantaneous news over the internet rather than waiting for the afternoon paper delivery. Since Jurassic Park, I have a higher standard regarding special effect movies. All this brings to mind how we in IT are conditioned. I came to expect getting paged over the weekend as routine and regarded such interruptions as “part of the job.” I would start each day expecting the worse; and generally my expectations were fulfilled beyond my anticipation. But it didn’t take too many Sunday morning pages to realize that there had to be a better way.

We in IT don’t need to settle for a life of interruptions, infrastructure faults, frustrated customers and poor morale. Edwards Deming said it best: “We have learned to live in a world of mistakes and defective products as if they were necessary to life. It is time to adopt a new philosophy.” The faults we deal with each day are not necessary to life. There is a better way. As any Six Sigma belt will tell you, the world looks completely different once you have completed a Six Sigma project. What seemed “normal” is no longer necessarily acceptable.

I feel very strongly that my students and the process and service improvement project team members I work with will come to expect a something better. Their expectations will increase. They will have no tolerance for faulty processes, accidental design, expensive maintenance, poor availability and excessive or frequent outages. Their world will be filled with a different set of expectations built upon a higher standard of effectiveness, efficiency and simplicity. And that is as it should be.

So what does this mean to you and me - to those of us who manage people? We have responsibility for our staff and must empower these folks to realize the world they envision. And I submit this not because it’s just the “right thing to do.” I offer this for discussion because if we are going to continue to attract the best people to information technology, we need start providing them the skills, tools and power to remake the world of “mistakes and defective products” into the new philosophy. They already know they do not have to settle for less. We need to see that they don’t have to.