I’m always fascinated by problems that transcend across totally unrelated industries. A classic example is communicating value, what it is you do and how important it is to your organization.
Over ten years ago when I was studying to be a music teacher, many of the classes had part of the curriculum set aside on communicating the value of music education to parents, principals, and superintendents. This was about the time when school districts started targeting fine arts and music programs.
Software testers run into the same problem, where there isn’t an obvious and tangible benefit to management so they are easily under-valued. In software development this manifests itself in the form of developing quality software, most easily measured by practices and scheduled time for unit testing, refactoring, and the like.
The inherent problem is asymmetrical information, that both parties do not have the same information available to make decisions. To complicate matters, everyone has their own priorities and agenda. What one person perceives as critically important might not matter a bit to another person in the same company, or even the same department.
But how do you communicate value? How do you explain that something is important, especially if it doesn’t have a tangable, physical value to the other party?
Is it going to guarantee success in the future? Is it going to make things better somehow? Can you prove or quantify that?
I believe the solution is education. Make the time to explain the value. Use facts and resist the temptation to exaggerate or incorporate personal bias as they often have secondary consequences such as loss of credibility or unrealistic expectations.
Understand that education alone doesn’t guarantee that they will agree with you, but at least you can be sure that you supplied the information to make a business decision based on facts.
I am left thinking there is a connection to the health and auto insurance problem, but will save that for another day.
