Last week we discussed When to implement Quality Assurance for Startups. This week we want to dive a little more into How without impacting everything else a Startup needs to do to make sales happen.
Often Startups make the assumption that Quality Assurance is unnecessary or unnecessary at this stage of the product or service life-cycle. This means that they might never get to it, and that’s not a dangerous practice to follow. There is also the obstacle of How to implement QA into processes without having it negatively impact the other areas of the business.
There are several questions we like to start with for implementing QA:
- What is currently a problem? If you cannot identify anything that is a problem then it is unlikely that an initiative will go anywhere.
- Is there a solution to the problem? If you cannot identity a solution to the problem reasonably quickly then you are in danger of expending more effort than the return.
- Can the solution be implemented with current resources and in a series of steps that are able to be done by those resources? If the solution requires extra resources then again the effort will likely exceed the return.
If the answers to all the above questions are positive then we are well on our way to identifying How to implement the required process improvements.
Look at the what has been identified as problems that fit the above criteria.
- Pick the most tractable one.
- Post it somewhere where you and everyone else can see it.
- Invite solutions for the problem.
- Hold a brainstorming session to pick the best solution.
- Create the list of steps that need to be done to implement the best solution.
- Determine what constitutes overall success and success for each step.
- Implement the measurement or metric that will measure whether that result has been realised.
- Measure the current status.
- Implement the steps.
- Measure the results.
None of this will be immediate but it will improve over time.
Next week: Examples.
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