Quality Assurance Centre of Excellence – Part 1

You may recall from some of our earlier discussions that Quality Assurance was defined as one or more of the following:

1. Proactive
2. Analytical
3. Focused on Root Causes
4. Focused on Process

So, given the above list, what can a Quality Assurance Centre of Excellence concentrate on in order to provide value to the organization:

Proactive –  In this scenario the Quality Assurance CoE would be looking ahead and seeing what can be anticipated. They could be looking at coming projects; coming changes in organization direction; new technologies that might impact the organization; and the entire environment in which the organization operates in an effort to anticipate the impact on technology. Big data and security come immediately to mind for many organizations. There is almost no end to what could be considered here.

Analytical – As opposed to the previous section, this is looking at data and analyzing what went right and what went wrong. Information comes from statistics and Post Implementation Reviews. The Quality Assurance CoE is gathers the data, collates it, and then provides information based on that data. They may act on the data or they may simply provide the data with the assumption that someone else will act on it within the specific project.

Focused on Root Causes – This can be applied to both of the above sections. In the Proactive section, the Quality Assurance CoE could look at Root Causes of potential issues and plan around them or else they could look at Root Causes from their analysis and work to understand and solve them. Regardless of which way this is dealt with, the problem could be dealt with at different levels. We could be looking at Root Causes for software development and deployment or we could be looking at root causes that impact the entire organisation (structure, culture, management).

Focused on Process – This also applies to all of the above and again can be applied at any level. The Quality Assurance CoE could be looking at very general processes for the entire organisation or very specific processes to resolve a specific problem.

Next week Being Proactive