How to: Set Your Quality Strategy in a New Project

Welcome to the series of How To:Quality. Your 3 min guide on how Quality Professionals address various business needs to drive Improvement and Governance.

Quality Professionals, regardless of the sector they work in, strive to help businesses achieve their strategic objectives. They do this in various ways: be it deploying governance frameworks, implementing improvement strategies, or delivering assurance programmes.

This month, I bring you steps you can adopt when you are setting up your Quality strategy in a new project. Read on if you are a Quality Professional, or a business leader who needs to maximise the success of their strategic initiatives.

How to: Quality

One Quality Professional I chatted with last month said Quality is the glue of organisations. She elaborated that Quality Professionals are better equipped to bridge gaps between all internal departments and customers for successful outcome. With this in mind, businesses can leverage on the skillset Quality Professionals poses to achieve the desired outcome.

In a competing economic environment, businesses are operating (or trying to) in an agile way. New products, new services (or improved ones) are being worked on as well as initiatives to make organisations more efficient and effective. All of this takes place in the form of projects. Quality Professionals sometimes champion these projects, and sometimes they join them to aid their successful delivery. To ensure your Quality strategy is relevant, follow these 4 steps:

1. Understand the scope of the project
2. Understand the needs of all stakeholders
3. Define the success criteria with the Project Manager
4. Agree on stage gates for sign off

1. Understand the scope of the project

Don’t jump in with any conclusions or decisions from the get go. Understand what the project is aiming to achieve, why it was set up, what objective will it support from the strategy and what areas that are to be ignored should you stumble on them.

The project triangle covers scope, cost and schedule. Review them, understand them, and analyse their dependencies.

2. Understand the needs of all stakeholders

You are still building a meaningful picture of this project and its requirement. You cannot achieve this without engaging with ALL stakeholders. I am talking about management, operations, IT, suppliers, customers, end users, testers, finance, regulators, etc. If you know who are the key stakeholders, start with them and work your way through the list. This is a critical step but one that can happen iteratively and over a period of time.

3. Define the success criteria with the project manager

If you are not the project manager, work with them to define the success criteria. If you work with product managers, define what the minimum viable product (MVP) is. You are aiming to understand what acceptable looks like. Why? Because this list will be your input for your Quality Strategy. It will help you assess whether this MVP meets your stakeholders requirements or not.

Take for example you are working with a product manager who is tasked to deliver a new online tool which will digitise the work flow of your operations team. One feature is the ability for a manager to approve a user, and this approval will trigger a notification to the user directly.

Acceptable Criteria could be:

• An intake page for a user to submit their request
• An pane for manager to see incoming requests
• A button to approve or reject
• A notification by email to the user that their request has been processed

Knowing the above will help you define how you are to plan your Quality plan.

Let’s say that the user could be an external user. The acceptable criteria would now need to include requirements from your commercial and marketing team for the company’s branding. You also understand that this workflow has a regulatory alignment and therefor a log of processed decisions has to be available. So you can work with the product manager to add:

• A log of all decisions on the tool to be exportable
• The intake page to include a company logo, use company colours, and have a company URL

Whether you are to prioritise the decision log testing over the company logo or vice versa can be achieved by going through the first 2 steps. If you are to provide a promote the new portal to external users first, the branding and look and feel of the portal might take precedent over the log of actions.

4. Agree on stage gates for sign off

This step is crucial for the success of the project. If you and the product manager are not calibrated, the project is likely to face some problems. Stage gates are milestones, or a particular point in the project, where work won’t progress unless all agreed actions and tasks have been achieved.

This is useful because it provides flexibility for the product manager to implement their own way of working with their teams, while maintaining their commitment to the schedule.

💡Your added value is not only assurance and supporting the QA testing plan. You provide governance through clarity on the project’s stage gates, aligning them to overall strategy and business requirements, and improvement through close collaboration with the involved teams.

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