Jasper has just started at a new client and is trying to find out how he can move forward.

And there he was, sitting at a desk and staring at the numbers he just had gotten from his client.
“Is this for real?” he said. “Are these all the defects from the last 5 projects? Everyone of these 18.356?”
He asked his client, the CIO of his client (a large business on waste cutting): “How big were these projects? Do you have any information on that?”

Peter was the CIO of a waste company. As the main business was the disposition of waste that was made by millions of people, the company couldn’t exist without good IT. He has been working in the IT and at the waste company for years and had seen a lot on different hypes on the improvement of the SDLC. A natural reluctance appeared on him when people tried to have the new best thing.

“How do you mean Jasper?” asked the CIO.
“I mean do you have a sizing numbers, like function points, hours spend, or kilo lines of code?”
“Ah, that you mean. Unfortunately not now, function points is something we tried to implement, but that didn’t work out. Hours spend on these projects is something I can find out for you, but I don’t think they will give you much input. The kilo lines of code you need to ask the project managers for those projects.”
“OK, if you can look for those numbers on hours that’ll be great. And why don’t you have the information of those kilo lines of code? Isn’t that something you have insight on?”
“Well, yes. But that doesn’t interest me so I don’t bother with it. It’s for the project managers or controllers.”

“Great!” he thought. “A CIO that doesn’t care about his own part of the business. How am I going to do this?”
“Why does he need to know how big the projects were? That amount of defects should have him over exited. All those defects for him to show how bad the developers did it!” Peter thought.
Peter didn’t understand yet, that defect numbers say something, but don’t say anything about the projects.

“OK, thanks. I’ll take a further look at these defects and if you could get me as much as possible that’ll be great for now.”
“I’ll ask my secretary to give you the information once I get it.” And he left the room.

Still Jasper was sitting there; Jasper stared at the documents he was just handed. “18.356 defects in five projects!” he mumbled, still full of disbelieve.

That was his first day on the job. The new year had just started and the first working day of that year he started at Your Waste Gone. A waste disposal company in Rotterdam, not far from his home. “It was an easy enough intake.” he thought, “should I have asked more on the earlier projects?” Did I do something wrong?

He needed to get a grip on these numbers. The client needed that as he didn’t have any real insight into his problems, just these defects, but they didn’t say anything. After some thoughts he decided to take a closer look at the defects. To look what kind of defects where done and what type was fixed. And not taking a deeper look into the severity or priority of the defects, but only at its origin.

As he found out this was called a root cause analysis.
“Thank you Wikipedia!” he thought. As he kept on looking for more information on this, he took notes. After a while he got to take a look at his notes and summarize what he just found.

“I need this RCA, that’s it what can help me found out where the defect originates!” he spoke out loud. Nobody was there to listen to him saying it, but Jasper thought he found the answer to his current problem.

But still he had to go through 18.356 defects. So he started with a plan, he would talk to the CIO and find out which of those 5 projects was the most representative and work on down from that. Hopefully he could use his earliest of finding to help out directly, instead of waiting till he had done all the 18.356 defects.

He was thinking about sending a mail to the CIO, but expected that it would come up on top of the pile of unread mails he already had. So he started to call the CIO’s secretary.

“CIO Office, with Margreet”, was the answer at the other end of the line.
“Hi this is Jasper, the new Supervisor. I spoke with Peter this morning about my assignment.”
“Ah yes, Peter mentioned you to me. How can I help you?”
“Well, I was hoping you maybe had the insight into the hours spend per project.”
“No sorry” Margreet responded.
“OK, I didn’t expect you to have them yet, but it never hurts to ask” Japser said with a smile.
As Margreet couldn’t see his smile to the phone line she was a little irritated by his accusation. “Is that all?” she asked.
“No, I was hoping to have 15 minutes with Peter and wanted to ask what was a good time for that. Could be by phone or just a short conversation.” Jasper said.
“Tomorrow he’s a all booked for the day. But if you call him at 6:45, he should be in the car.”
“OK, I’ll do that.” And Peter laid down the phone. “6:45 is not a problem he thought. I start early!”