The Big Picture

Robert Fulghum is the author of the bestselling book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, which is one of my favorite books. The followup book, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It, was also very good. In that book, he told the following story:

A traveler went to Chartres in France to see the great church that was being built there. He arrived at the site just as the workmen were leaving for home. He asked a man, covered with dust, what he did there. The man replied that he was a stonemason. Another man, when asked, said he was a glassblower, who made slabs of colored glass. Another said he was a blacksmith who pounded iron.

Wandering inside the unfinished edifice, the traveler came upon an older woman, armed with a broom, sweeping up the stone chips, wood shavings and glass shards from the day's work. "What are you doing?" he asked. The woman leaned on her broom, looked toward the high arches and replied, "Me? I'm building a cathedral for the glory of God."

Now there was a woman who knew how to look at the big picture.

Some recent events at my job reminded me of this story. I work for a computer company testing software. My job is to make sure the product does what it's supposed to do and that the quality is good enough for our customers.

With the current economy people are worried about their jobs and hope they rank high in their department. Managers are always trying to measure employees, and for QA people one of the common measurements is the number of defects found during testing. It's not a foolproof measurement, but it's a tangible one that gets used a lot.

A coworker mentioned to me that his manager was disappointed that another group found a defect in his product instead of him. Of course, there's many valid reasons for this: 1) that set of testing wasn't his responsibility, 2) that defect wasn't there when he tested it and was just recently introduced, or 3) the other group had the resources to test it and his group didn't. His concern was that his ranking would be lower because he wasn't the one that found the defect.

To me, it's a shame that he has to worry about that. I'm not saying it's not a valid concern because I'm sure his manager will use this in his ranking. However, we should be happy that the defect was even found before the product was shipped, no matter who found it. Our job is to ship a product that has value for the customer and works well.

That's the big picture.