When Deming wrote his book Out Of The Crisis in 1982 the IT industry as we know it did not exist, but Deming is just as relevant to the world of IT today as he was, and still is, to manufacturing. Consequently our consultancy makes good use of his 14 points:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs: Often we see short term decisions made to solve today's problem which then damage future development. We have to believe that there will be a future.
2. Adopt a new philosophy: Quality is everyone’s job.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality: QA (quality assurance) testing usually finds the problem too late. The best answer is to design bugs out rather than retrofit fixes. If you haven’t time to do it right when will you have time to do it over?
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one service, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust: How can you feel secure knowing critical components or expertise come from the lowest bidder?
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs: Stop the periodic purges, upheavals, reorganizations, etc. Use Root Cause Analysis to identify the interrelated problems and causes of variation in a process and remove them.
6. Institute training: Too many managers have no understanding of variation, so the first training to introduce would be the use of process behaviour charts to end knee jerk decisions which actually make things worse by introducing more variation.
7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of engineers: If Deming was right and 95% of problems come from the system and not from the people working in the system, then we have to improve the people who designed the system and they are Management.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company: Decisions made in the interests of meeting arbitrary targets, avoiding blame or keeping ones job are damaging to the company. A company with fear is a company with a stressed, unhappy and ineffective workforce. problems: Funtionally organised companies work sub optimally in favour of departmental self interest and against the good of the company. Buy any Dilbert book.
9. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force:Goodhart said that once data are used for targets they are unreliable. Deming says that the easy way to meet targets which are outside your control is to cheat and lie. You want a workforce full of deceivers? You want to be deceived? Then give them arbitrary targets.
10. Eliminate work standards (KLOCs, bug fix counts, etc.) among developers and support personnel. Substitute leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals: Understand variation.
11. Remove barriers that rob the hourly workers of their right to pride of workmanship. Code ownership should be out of pride and not considered punishment. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective: If the system is the problem then how it buffets you around and affects your annual review is just a lottery. Good luck. Try it the other way around. Review you manager's success in designing a good way for you to work. See Maverick, Ricardo Semler.
12. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement:
13. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job:

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