Every project in the organizational paradigm goes through a lot of different stages where it’s tried and tested to make sure that it withstands the enormous pressure that the open market is going to put on it. And the most important of all of these stages is Quality Control.
Quality control is the factor that has a lot of different things riding on it. The popularity of the product and the consistency of the company to produce immaculate products and services for their customer base are the main ones.
However, important as it might be, but the majority of the companies that invest in the ventures of quality control, do so unintentionally.
They don’t have a clear idea of how to approach quality control and mostly it is from their previous experiences or just sheer dumb luck that they produce amazing products.
In this article, we will make sure that you design your quality control procedure that will solidify the success of your products in the market for many years to come through these three points.
- What is a quality management plan?
- The benefits of quality management
- What are the basic steps to create an effective quality management plan?
Let’s start at the very beginning.
What is Quality Management?
Quality management in every project in every field is to make sure that the product or service you are developing is going to bring immense value to the company and is going to be seamlessly maintained later.
Quality control is not a stagnant process that is only activated when the product is fully developed, rather it is a constant process that starts from the very first-day production starts and sticks with the process until it is delivered to the customer.
To make sure that you understand what quality management is, you first need to understand what it means when we mention the word “quality”. The following are two of the most important aspects of quality management:
- Process Quality: if you are in the position of a project manager, then it’s your job to create and maintain all of the product development processes. But if we look at the bigger picture, then we also need to consider what impact the quality management process has on the troop’s ability to generate value.
- Product Quality: The product quality is related to your actual service or product that your company is trying to push. This can be the application that your team has built, the design prototypes that your team is trying to push or even just the code documentation of your new product or service that your company wants to launch in the market.
What are the Benefits of Quality Management?
There is an absurd amount of benefits when it comes to Quality Management process. Some of them are:
- The first and the most important benefit of quality management is that the product that the company ends up making is significantly superior and stable to the ones that have not gone through this process.
This will make sure that your previous fan-base and your potential customers see the extraordinary product and service, and stick to your company for their future business ventures. - When you incorporate quality management throughout the production process of your service or product, you make sure that there is little to no room for error. Why? Because the planning, process, and testing of the product at various stages will be seamlessly performed with built-in back-up plans if necessary.
- When the process goes so smoothly without any obstacles, you generate results ate a healthy pace that creates an unbreakable bond between you and your customers. This helps you to retain your customers because they know that their investment won’t be wasted with you.
- When all of these steps are made sure to happen, there is an increase in collaboration among your troops as well, and also their trust levels among themselves increase. This will make all of the team members and the stakeholders to be on the same page and less room for contradiction among each other on any future endeavors of the company.
Read this blog:
Top 5 Resources for QA Performance Analysis
What are the Basic Steps to Create an Effective Quality Management Plan?
Investing in a Quality management plan at the very start of every project is a brilliant idea. It is mostly recommended to do so as well because it keeps all of the remaining cogs of the production process, running smoothly.
If you have a test engineer in your team, the role of creating a quality management plan must go to them. And when they have created the plan and it has been approved by everyone, this plan must be easily accessible to everyone involved.
Here are eight of the basic steps needed to create an effective quality management plan.
- Firstly, you need to make sure that everyone on your team knows about the importance of quality for the whole production process and the project as a whole. This will also help you to iron out the details regarding quality and what the acceptable level of quality is to the company. To get these details, you need to ask your team these following questions:
- What is the importance of the performance of this project for the company?
- How does the company want them to measure success?
- What are the project controls that the company wants to maintain?
- The second step is to divide up the responsibilities to be performed in the process of quality management. This step also includes:
- Maintaining a target device list
- Approving a release version of the product
- Writing an effective acceptance criterion for the user stories
- Determining all of the target devices for this endeavor. This device list depends on the criterion your developers are choosing. The general targets are:
- Hardware and age of hardware
- Web browsers and versions
- Internet connection requirements
- Operating systems and versions
- Screen resolutions
- The expected amount of concurrent users
- Write the acceptance criteria for the quality management process.
- Integrating all of the test units that your developers have created into the code.
- Creating a deployment pipeline for your developers as well as quality checks to be performed whenever they need to.
- Creating a regression testing process that is useful for gating the releases.
- Choosing software to combine the results of all of these steps.
Conclusion
Quality management is a tough process, and often convoluted with unforeseen challenges. Obviously, software tools lend in a lot of assistance, but we cannot complete the human element. This is all the more reason to hire quality managers.
Yes, quality assurance managers also work in IT companies – i.e. if you thought that these folks are only working in a typical line production setup. Their job is to straighten out the kinks and make sure that the MVP and the final product are bug-free for happy customer experience.
If you have been associated with one such company or worked as a person responsible for a quality management plan, then be sure to share your thoughts through the comments section below. We’d love to hear all about it. Alternatively, you can also write to us, by sending us an email at fwilson@ntaskmanager.com.
