Testimonial: Solving Inter-team Conflicts with April

April is an engineer who runs the quality assurance team for her company.  Previously, when April’s QA team found problems with the product design during testing, the design team had to redo weeks of work.  They complained, “QA ruined our schedule; they wrote us up for this and now we can’t ship.”  

April was frustrated that the design team blamed her QA team for doing their jobs, “As if we control whether they pass the tests.”  

Then April took a Visionary Vocabularies workshop on the values reconciliation method and decided to apply the method to her problem.  First she looked at what her own QA team wanted: compliance with product standards.  Then she looked at what the design team wanted: finishing designs on schedule.  Finally she looked at opportunities for making both of those goals happen.  Pretty soon April realized that there was a way for the QA team to help the design team pass the tests on time, without compromising on the tests.  

First, April went back to the design team and reassured them that she supported their goal of delivering finished designs on schedule.  “I think there was a misconception that we don’t care about their schedule,” she told me afterward.  “We hate stopping the show because they don’t pass.”  

After telling the design team how much she cared, April showed it.  She suggested a change in the development routine.  “Don’t wait to come to us until you have the whole design done,” she told them.  “Come early, come often.  We’ll test bits and pieces.  Bring us two copies of a part–we’ll run two different tests at once and get you more data earlier.”  

Until April reached out to them, the design team didn’t realize that QA was more than willing to accommodate them.  “They got the message that we wanted to be better team players by doing more testing for them.”  

Now, April reports, the design team is starting to enjoy working with QA.  They’re more engaged in the quality assurance process.  There are fewer complaints and more conversations happening between the teams.  Instead of blaming the QA team for delays, people are saying, “We’re working together to get our schedule to happen.”  

“The values reconciliation method was key in me asking ‘Okay, what do these people want from me?’  It let me improve life for both teams.”  

–April, CA