By Fran Dwyer
When the fortune 100 company I worked for had to contract its workforce and I found myself in transition, I decided to document and share my efforts to understand the current hiring landscape in quality. In a series called “Company Road Trip,” I’ll be reporting my findings from visits with quality professionals and hiring managers at a variety of organizations in the northeast region of the United States.
Look for more articles in this series in the Career Center in the coming weeks and months.
I recently visited a major telecom company to discuss activities in the area of process improvements. Over several years, this company had gone through a number of acquisitions, which is tricky business. Without extensive planning, acquisitions that seem to bring immediate benefits can later come back to bite the organization, causing disjointed tool rollouts, broken processes, and ineffective structuring. Usually, limited budget dollars end up being spent on critical-path projects that will contribute directly to future revenue growth.
I met with a person responsible for hiring a senior level process improvement director, focusing on two primary questions:
The answer to the first question was not the result of some “ah-ha moment” but rather pure economics. Consumers are spending less on the company’s services, and the need for a more efficient business process strategy that could be supported by a lean organizational structure was in order.
The answer to the second question was still evolving. The company originally had felt that a Six Sigma background was a must. The Six Sigma Black Belt candidates who interviewed for the position, however, uniformly presented one particular query to the hiring manager: Is there executive level sponsorship for the initiative? The answer was, “No, that's what we would hire you to do—champion this initiative and be responsible for its outcome. Executive leadership would not have the time to be involved.”
Hiring a Six Sigma Black Belt had begun to seem like the wrong way to go. Instead, aiming for smaller, incremental process improvement steps, perhaps via lean, was looking like the way to proceed. At last update, the company was still discussing this direction.
Kudos to this company for making process improvement a priority. Recognizing the need is a big first step, even if leadership is not quite sure at this time what the best strategy is.
In an environment like this, quality professionals have an opportunity to prove their full value. As much as their role is to improve products, services, processes, and systems, understanding their audiences and providing appropriate information to help traverse knowledge gaps is a real winning strategy.
Imagine if those candidates for the role mentioned above had thoroughly researched the company and come equipped with, for instance, a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) approach as a learning tool, providing background on the model, where they feel the company fits into the model, and a vision for future development. Offering insight into solutions and sharing knowledge that can benefit companies shows impressive thought leadership from a candidate.
Fran Dwyer is a quality management professional with experience in developing global software quality assurance organizations and managing global project teams. He successfully developed a start-up testing organization that delivered the first online music store, Lycos Music. He also managed the testing organization for a fortune 100 company that developed next-generation cable industry products, driving a fourfold increase in business unit revenue. Recently, he led a project team with numerous internal and external partners at a fortune 100 cable company to develop process improvements that reduced delayed responses to customer issues by 40 percent.
Read more articles from Fran Dwyer by visiting his blog, Quality Sphere.