Projects Fail When Inspection Comes Late

Testing later is usually another way of scheduling rework.

“The performance of a system doesn’t depend on how the parts perform taken separately, it depends on how they perform together, how they interact.” Russell L. Ackoff

“A bad system will beat a good person every time.” W. Edwards Deming

In my last post, I argued that Release on Demand depends on several conditions being true inside the delivery system, and you can find that post here: https://www.projectmanagementforum.net/post/release-on-demand-is-easy-to-describe-and-much-harder-to-make-real

Organizations like to dress this up as something technical. It is not.

Strong projects examine work before they build on it.

That is not an Agile idea. It is not a SAFe idea. It is not some modern delivery fad. It is basic project discipline.

In construction, the builder gets signoff on the foundation before framing begins. No serious person says, “Let’s just keep moving and check it later.” That is not speed. It is an invitation to rework.

The same logic applies everywhere.

If the work product has not been reviewed early and often enough to confirm it is fit for what comes next, the project is not moving forward with confidence. It is moving forward on assumption. Those are very different conditions.

This is where weak systems create predictable trouble.

They treat inspection as delay. They treat early review as overhead. They call it bureaucracy when someone asks for evidence before the next layer of work begins. Then they act surprised when problems found late are larger, more expensive, and attached to other problems that were built on top of them.

That is not bad luck. That is the system doing exactly what it was set up to do.

The labels vary by industry, but the discipline is the same. Mature delivery systems do not wait until the end to find out whether the work holds up. They examine it while correction is still possible and before downstream work turns a manageable issue into a broader mess.

This is why I get skeptical when people talk about speed as if it means moving faster through uncertainty. Real speed comes from reducing uncertainty early, not dragging it downstream and acting surprised when it becomes expensive.

The issue is not whether your project claims to have testing. Almost every troubled project does. The issue is whether the work is being inspected at the point where the answer still matters.

If not, the project is not really building confidence as it progresses. It is accumulating risk and calling it progress.

That is the point.

Strong projects examine work early because building on unverified work is one of the oldest and most reliable ways to make a project look healthy right up until it doesn’t.

In the next post, I’ll take that same principle into SAFe and explain why deferred testing makes Release on Demand sound better than it works.

For more information about SAFe training and coaching, visit: https://www.prosperprojectmanagement.com/

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