Let's talk about quality...
Simon Sinek tells a story about car manufacturing and it does a great job illustrating the idea of "Building Quality Into Your Product." A group of Japanese car manufacturing executives visited one of their American car plants. As the story goes, they noticed that once cars exited the assembly line there was someone with a rubber mallet that would tap on the doors. Confused, they asked the purpose of this activity. The American car makers responded "this is where we make sure the doors fit properly. You don't do that at your plants?" The executives response was "No. We design the doors to fit before we make them."
I was facilitating a retrospective where this idea proved invaluable. During the intense conversation, the team dug in to the Quality Control aspect of their workflow. The catalyst for the conversation was a broken "work in progress limit" for the Testing activity, but they quickly realized the WIP Limit was not the issue. The process of testing was quick and straightforward enough, but the real problem presented when a test failed or a quality standard was missed. This caused the work to sit waiting until someone upstream was able to context switch and fix the problem. As you can imagine, work would sit for hours, if not days, while other work would pile up behind it. "How does this relate to doors on a Subaru," you may ask? Alright, alright, we're getting there...
After some great discussion, the team thought "why not design better doors?" In other words, they decided to start thinking about quality earlier in the process. They shipped their resident QA expert's quality checklist to the "front of the line" so that everyone on the team could bake in quality. They didn't even have to mandate anyone own parts of the list. Instead they just appealed to each other's desire to build quality solutions as well as their love for each other. In the end, they realized they didn't need to buy "rubber mallets for the doors," or even have someone that specialized in "creative door persuasion." They designed in quality as part of the process.
Now, this will require that you and your quality expert can put aside your specialist hat and have everyone on the team take on the role of quality control. But this is the definition of being Empowered. The checklist in this story is the tool that allowed the team to be empowered to solve problems faster and with higher quality than a team that relies on a single person to handle quality. It's hard work, but nothing valuable comes easy. Take some time in your next retro and ask your team how you can start to "design better doors before you make them."