The role of the Cxx-level in Whitebox Expectations
Start by asking for the quality of the requirements.
See more in the pitch.
When the teams are getting concerned about the quality of the requirements, the rest is basic change management in the special light of Expectations Engineering. Furthermore successful managers pays special attention to the following issues
The benefit of well performed Expectations Engineering is implicitly well known. But that is not a sufficient level of awareness. A reasonable expectation to the business benefit must be defined to ensure an organisational commitment to Expectations Engineering. But how a e.g. 20% increase in new products to the market will increase the bottom line must be determined by executive management.
The required investment is done in the daily life by all involved employees, mainly in form of small improvements, training and trying out new ways of working. Small activities, but still these activities have to be prioritized by the employees and their leaders in fierce competition with all the daily activities. Unless there is a dedicated rewarding system in place to ensure this prioritization, all improvement activities are doomed to be continuously postponed. They simply never happen, and performance stays the same, at the best, and decline if the business is growing.
Establishing the reward structure to ensure the required investment to achieve the business target is done by executive management.
Expectations Engineering is a team effort assuming that all involved employees have a common goal of creating great solutions – fast. Some classical organisational structures are however prohibitive for Expectations Engineering, e.g. distribution af responsibilities, and the fine balance between short term personal goals and long term company goals must be managed carefully. This falls entirely outside the span of control for the teams and their leaders, and must be done by executive management.
Caveat! Establishing Expectations Engineering capabilities is the responsibility of the classic line organisation as described here and can not be delegated to a process/quality/support organisation! Delegating is the greatest pitfall, and executive management must prevent this.
The research leading to the ImprovAbility model clearly proofs, that lack of these organisational commitments to improvements has maintained the problem with delayed and poor quality solutions in the industry for many decades.
Fortunately, it only takes a few actions to establish the required leadership.
Learn more about Whitebox Expectations courses here.
