Dolphin integration - Our dedication to Quality

While self-deceptive behaviors about the ISO-9001 certification were commonly encountered until the late nineties, the DOLPHIN team, because of their focus on true growth. They have preferred not to rush to obtain a mere label of certification, so as to succeed instead in their endeavor toward true and lasting Quality at DOLPHIN. Today, the process toward certification is on the move, but it must be considered as a stage along the unceasing path of our Quality proceedings.
They have made the choice of positioning Quality at the heart of relational behavior, with adult transactions, as the process itself to define responsibilities.
The reason why a true quality discipline requires a constant effort is because of the permanent temptation of humans to stop thinking, and to fall into irrelevant habits or emotional disturbances. Entropy, which threatens us, requires this constant effort to reconstruct, while preparing a quality procedure is tantamount to planning ahead to wisely face an uncertain future!

Quality is the daughter of Reactivity and the mother of Growth

Quality is all too often recommended for reducing the costs of non-quality: but mere cost-reduction has never made the grade in winning enterprises. In any case, in our high technology profession, weaknesses with respect to quality have a binary effect, deadly. What we are struggling for is Growth in this context of search for Quality: Growth which may only result from reducing all lead-times, especially those which affect our customers, marching with the rhythm of Time-To-Market (TTM), through our reactivity to well-understood needs of customers!
In other words, ”Quality is the mother of Growth”.
The popularized qualifier of "right-on-first-pass" is the proper characteristic of Microelectronics. Another of Dolphin’s assets is to have consistently promoted the methods of Total Simulation, of Virtual Test and of Hierarchical Design, and we still are striving toward their generalization, as they purport essential offering of solutions, world unique.
Naturally, our criterion for quality is minimization of all lead-times, since non-quality is first felt as what causes delays and customer dissatisfaction. At a time of emergence of Silicon Intellectual Property, productized as Virtual Components, emphasis must be placed on the quality of Empowering Services provided by our delegated consultants, to enable smoothing-out overloads or under-competencies.
This is why "Quality is the daughter of Urgency"

Quality made accountable

Processes emerge little-by-little, depending on the corporate evolutions for adapting to a competitive environment. They translate the actions and interactions existing internally and put into service for the satisfaction of our prospects and customers. They also enable our teams to take the needed distance with respect to their daily activities. Each "Dolphinese" may have to partake in the creation and in the evolutions of processes and procedures. Responsibilities w.r.t. Quality thus are distributed:
There is no Quality Control Manager at DOLPHIN, since self-control here is essential.

Responsibility therefore is in the hands of each operational manager (of a Project, of a Product, or of a team) for deciding which procedures must be written down and at what time. Each manager must know how to position himself in "adult mode" so that the Quality System and its procedures be applied optimally. It is the same for our approach of "Collective Problem resolution", which shall not succeed if whoever is operationally responsible for it is in "parent mode" or "child mode".

However, existence or absence of a procedure shall never justify not doing it differently or correctly if common sense demands it. Procedures must never bridle creative imagination, only guide it and serve as minimal reference.
Consequently, at DOLPHIN it is always proper not to respect a procedure or prohibition, in full conscience though - without lightheadedness - since the rule then becomes "no right to fail"!

Actually, this must be experienced as the obligation for every employee to appropriate and to reassess a procedure before its application, before turning it into a Plan of Action.
Additionally, an essential interpretation of quality procedures is to consider them as for a document of collective know-how to ease training of new hires and to facilitate growth…

Efficiency and effectiveness as criteria

Let us quote Games people play" of the well-known American Psychoanalyst Eric Berne in "The psychology of human relations" (1964) who expresses some foundations of our culture in this respect.

"Two variables are used in evaluating procedures. A procedure is said to be efficient when the agent makes the best possible use of the data and experience available to him, regardless of any deficiencies that may exist in his knowledge. If the Parent or the Child interferes with the Adult's data-processing, the procedure becomes contaminated and will be less efficient. The effectiveness of a procedure is judged by actual results. Thus efficiency is a psychological criterion and effectiveness is a material one".

Efficiency and effectiveness as criteria

Let us quote the famous American psychoanalyst Eric Berne's "Games people play", the father of Transaction Analysis in "The psychology of human relationships" (1964).

"A procedure is a series of simple complementary adult transactions directed toward the manipulation of reality. Reality is defined as having two aspects: static and dynamic. Static reality comprises all the possible arrangements of matter in the universe. Arithmetic, for example, consists of statements about static reality. Dynamic reality may be defined as the potentialities for interaction of all the energy systems in the universe. Chemistry, for example, consists of statements about dynamic reality. Procedures are based on data processing and probability estimates concerning the material of reality, and reach their highest development in professional techniques. Piloting an airplane and removing an appendix are procedures. Psychotherapy is a procedure insofar as it is under the control of the therapist's Adult, and it is not a procedure insofar as his Parent or Child takes over the executive. The creating of a procedure is determined by the material, on the basis of estimates made by the agent's Adult.
Two variables are used in evaluating procedures. A procedure is said to be efficient when the agent makes the best possible use of the data and experience available to him, regardless of any deficiencies that may exist in his knowledge. If the Parent or the Child interferes with the Adult's data-processing, the procedure becomes contaminated and will be less efficient. The effectiveness of a procedure is judged by actual results. Thus efficiency is a psychological criterion and effectiveness is a material one."
It suffices to extend from Psychotherapy to Problem-solving straightforwardly: "Problem-solving is a procedure insofar as it is under the control of the Manager's Adult, and it is not a procedure insofar as his Parent or Child takes over the executive."

Organization Charts, disciplines and procedures

DOLPHIN's modern approaches are anathemas for some consultants: flat organization charts, focus on personnel roles as opposed to titled functions or to objectives and tasks, dual hierarchies, etc. They have a single purpose: enrichment of every person's responsibilities.

The team adheres to diverse recommendations for practices, disciplines or procedures, and they are upgraded in an adhoc manner at the first awareness that progress is required. That is to say, planning in the face of uncertainties. They are mostly defined in accordance with scheduling needs (monthly reports, quarterly book closure, semester budgeting).
But they are also in accordance with competency needs of employees (Individual objective-setting, salary reviews and performance assessments), and above all with customer satisfaction: integration of our virtual components within the design process of our customers, general sales conditions of our Trust Agreement…

Six sets of documents and forms illustrate our concern for quality of personnel:

Job description at the time of recruiting
Interview process for hiring marketing and sales personnel
Booklet for the new employee
Mentor's roles (sensitizing meetings…)
Personnel Manual (edited per Deliberations of the Enterprise Committee)
Quality System Manual (validated by to management)

What counts is not what we do but what we deliver

Quality understood as Customers' Satisfaction

It is worth noting that customer satisfaction has a dual criterion: either seen as "quality met", or equivalently as "scheduling satisfied".

Since the outside world is that of all our stakeholders, including our prospects, three documents or principles describe the controls regarding relations with the outside:

Organization of external communications : telephone, fax, courier, emails and FTP accounts on Internet…
from Order Entry to Delivery Shipments
Transfer of all messages under the form of normalized Promotion Sheets to ensure the quality of our Web-site.

More generally, special care is applied to track compliance with Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), as well as the "disclosure policy", and it is part of the corporate strategy for public communication.
All these moves toward objective quality are subject to questioning by the Audit committee, which reports to the Board of directors.

Actually the outside world is comprised of shareholders and stakeholders, so an overall document is essential: that of "our rules for corporate governance" to position ourselves properly, management and employees alike, with respect to them. The regulation of Financial Markets has led us since 2004 to write-down a report on Internal Controls, as an annex to the annual Management report.