Dear Bob ... I'm a staff person, and I see the problem [of trying to deliver quality when management rewards heroics - Bob] from the other side. All the manager really wants or has patience for is the "98%". Staff people aren't allowed to finish jobs, because there is always another "hot" task waiting to be done. The rewards are for slamming work into production, not for bringing tasks to a good conclusion. Dear Bob …I’m a staff person, and I see the problem [of trying to deliver quality when management rewards heroics – Bob] from the other side. All the manager really wants or has patience for is the “98%”. Staff people aren’t allowed to finish jobs, because there is always another “hot” task waiting to be done. The rewards are for slamming work into production, not for bringing tasks to a good conclusion. What are some ideas for getting upper management to agree to doing work right instead of installing half-baked projects that require an inordinate amount of company resources to support?– Slammin’ but not proud of it Dear Slammin’ …So here’s my question: If you and upper management disagree about what it means to do work “right,” who’s right?One way of looking at this is that upper management, and in particular the project’s business sponsor, define quality – a synonym for “doing it right.” If the business sponsor wants the work done cheaper and quicker, and is willing to live with slipshod engineering to get it, welcome to the World Wide Web during its formative years, and just about every Hollywood set ever built. It sounds convincing until you live through the experience and the years that follow it, and see how quickly the business leadership forgets that the slipshod engineering was an agreed-upon trade-off for lower cost and quicker delivery. Heck, go back six years and look at business attitudes toward the Y2K challenge. The bytes conserved by storing two-digit year fields saved the world of commerce at least billions, and according to some estimates trillions of dollars. How many executives said, “Well, we saved the money then, so I guess we shouldn’t complain about having to reinvest some of it now.”There might have been one somewhere, but if there was I missed the event.In the end, I know of only one solution: Over the span of years, IT has to build a strong relationship with the rest of the business as a trusted, credible participant in the success of the enterprise. This isn’t a CIO responsibility, or rather it isn’t restricted to the CIO. It’s a responsibility shared by every employee in IT, addressed with every interaction each employee has with anyone in the business. It’s through that trust that IT project managers, architects, managers and developers can discuss the long-term cost of poorly engineered, inadequately tested software. And it’s through that same trust, by the way, that IT project managers, architects, managers and developers can accept decisions to implement fast, cheap solutions when that really is the best alternative for the business.– Bob ——– Technology Industry