Link: http://www.etc-architect.com/?p=243
From ETC-Architect
Have you ever tried to implement TQM or similar in your family or into your own social environment? Properly not and if then you quickly know that it fails very fast. Usually the reason is that different members have a different definition on the importance of quality and also lack motivation. A typical example is house and kitchen cleaning done by all members of the household. If you do not believe me just try it out.
Now if we are doing something on a large organisation that is not working on a smaller organisation we need to enforce it via pressure. This usually means that the least empowered team members will have to do as they are told while the senior managers will only do lip service. This is also something you see in any organisation. Usually after some years TQM even stops at all executive levels as there is no threat attached for failing. The people that are on the lower echelon usually come to an arrangement of working a parallel track in doing what they like and on the other hand applying to the minimum of the process.
A good example is almost any CRM system where people either will add certain mandatory information in the system and the make their own notes or when directed by a smart architect freely attach the notes to one any many clients. A reason for this behaviour is if the client in question is really awful and uncooperative a rep will label him APITA (a pain in the a**). Such a remark is usually not allowed in any CRM so instead a double filling is done so that the rep will plan a visit to one APITA a day only.
So all this gets important to us as architects when we work with a BPO on a TQM led project as we need to be aware of the parallel worlds and on ways that we can plug that gap without being disloyal. It is also important to remember not to get too upset once the BPO are implementing certain very specific notions that we see breaking UX best practices, as we instead should design for a more flexible approach and sell this with the argument of later business process improvements to come.
