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Whatâs the most challenging thing associated with Quality Coaching?
Bonus points for community commentary
I think the most challenging thing with âquality coachingâ is to accept it as official term, because even though most people belive in quality but quality coaching is something that is unusual. But even though big organization may realize it and may work on it, but when it comes to mid or smaller level organization they will be reluctant in Adopting quality coaching, there are multiple issues behind that. One of the most common issue is that the mid or small level companies are start-up which already have scarcity of resources in comparison to task and then budget, time ,etc. All other issue. So for them delivering product is important.
If we integrate quality coaching into qa process then it might be possible that the quality coaching may be encouraged but focusing on it as standalone topic will be difficult task
I put lack of engagement because as Iâve mentioned before, youâre coaching isnât necessarily wanted or deemed as needed because, youâre a tester right? Weâre all guilty of looking at other roles and saying âThatâs their jobâ, and testers can get that a lot. The fact is jobs evolve to the work that needs doing and to me thats where the quality coach comes in, its an evolution.
So in my opinion, youâve got to stick your foot in the door, prove the benefits to stakeholders so that they can see you as an expert in identifying quality risks.
Be prepared to repeat yourself and not get hung up on if your advice or suggestions arenât adopted. If just one person in that closed product or dev meeting, says âmaybe we should bring in QA to see what quality risks they seeâ then your influence is working.
Different perspective of what quality is.
In one context I experienced many different opinions on quality, and we pulled in probably too many of those at the same time, messing everything up for a while until people started leaving/getting fired, letting go of their strong opinions.
And besides this, there are changes in people and context of the product at a time and opinions change, causing a bit more stress of throwing away changes that were started, picking up new directions/quality criteria to focus on.
Seeing the implication that there is one type of quality, mostly defined by people originating from testing.
I canât say that Iâm happy about some decisions of managers, but also have I learned that delivering early is sometimes more valuable (e.g. for not losing a customer) that having less bugs in the product.
We cannot solve easily problems in the company culture by advocating for end-user quality, when company greed steps.
The cause of enshitification is beyond single companies.
The thing for quality coaching is the same thing as everything else thatâs most challenging. " Change Management "
People want change, but donât want to change themselves.
#consultancy1o1
If you are talking about making changes to teams, communication between teams, management, stakeholders or business⌠change is always a rough thing to bite through. Especially when itâs going to change their way of working.
AND especially when they are the bottleneck.
Deep entrenched different views that perhaps you had before but moved on from as part of your coaching journey that you now see in others and know from personal experience its a hard change for them to.
That alongside believing you have have really made an impact and coached others to a level where you feel they have managed themselves to drop that baggage and embrace new views around quality only to see 6 or 12 months later they have reverted back to a path of least resistance and there old ways of thinking when you were not there to support them.
You then question your coaching ability even though you know from your own experience the journey is hard and coaching is not a short term fix when entrenched views and factors that encourage path of least resistance are in play.
This is part of coaching and questioning yourself and importantly also coaching yourself when your focus is on others is challenging.
This! OMG 100% this!!!
For me, the hardest thing is just that feeling of âwhat have I achieved this day/week/month?â Being a coach means youâre advising and working through people and that feels so much different to being a senior or lead in a project team. Some days you might not have the engagement or opportunity to work with anyone and it can feel like you havenât made any impact at all.
Plus having the resilience (as Andrew said) to be able to manage when people revery back to the old ways. Or being okay with saying the same thing over and over again in different ways to get through to people.
My big advice is to find community members who are pals, so you can have people to talk to about all this. Being a quality coach can mean being the only quality professional in an organisation which can be a bit lonely⌠so find some peers to chat to!
I went for lack of engagement as one of my biggest challenges is that people often just donât have the time or capacity to help move quality forward. They are too darn busy firefighting quality issues. 
However Iâd add that just simply defining my role has proven immensely challenging. I think this also ties into the following:
Not just for my own sense of accomplishment but with my manager and other leaders. To take up peopleâs time I often feel the need to prove the value, even though there might not have a tangible or immediate return.
I think it is worth calling out that lack of engagement from teams doesnât necessarily mean that the team donât want to engage.
Letâs take the proverb:
âgive a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetimeâ
It works for quality coaching I think. However the challenge that you might face as a fishing coach is that man in the proverb probably isnât sitting around all day. It may seem worthwhile to spend 60 minutes in an afternoon to explore why they failed to catch anything to eat the previous day, but the poor sod might be under pressure to finish the house they are building.
You could also say that starving people canât learn to fish. Some teams and engineers are swamped with activity, firefighting, cognitive overhead that they just donât have the brainpower to be coached. Itâs a good ability to be able to spot this and offer to help take some of the pain away to free up time and energy for people to start to learn new things.