Quality Assurance Assessment: Why you can't afford to skip this step!

Quality assurance assessment and improvement is a process of evaluating and improving the quality of products, services, or processes within a business or organization. In essence, it is an ongoing process that involves identifying potential quality issues, tracking performance metrics, and implementing corrective actions to continuously improve quality. By doing so, businesses can improve customer satisfaction, reduce waste and costs, and increase productivity and profitability.

Why it is Important:

• Assessments help identify gaps in the current state versus the desired state. The key steps to bridge this gap is to create an action plan.
• By identifying and eliminating quality issues through Quality Assurance assessment and improvement, businesses can reduce waste and save costs.
• Prioritizing quality assurance assessment and improvement helps businesses ensure they are compliant with the required regulations and avoid potential fines or legal issues.
• This continuous improvement process can help businesses stay ahead of the curve and adapt to changing customer and market trends.
• Helps businesses ensure that their products and services consistently meet or exceed customer expectations.

Types of QA assessments:

• Product Assessment - It involves evaluating the quality of a product. This can include testing the product for defects, checking its functionality, and ensuring it meets customer requirements.
• Process Assessment - It involves evaluating the quality of a specific business process, such as manufacturing, sales, payments, or customer service. This can include identifying bottlenecks, analyzing workflows, and identifying areas for improvement.
• Service Assessment - It involves evaluating the quality of a service, such as a customer support call center or a technical support team. This can include evaluating the responsiveness of the service, the quality of communication, and the ability to resolve issues effectively.
• Internal Audit - It is a comprehensive assessment of an organization's quality management system. It involves reviewing processes, procedures, and documentation to ensure they comply with quality standards, regulations, and customer requirements.

How to do it right:

• The first step is to define clear and specific quality objectives that are aligned with the organization's goals and customer expectations. Objectives should be measurable and timebound.
• The next step is to identify the key metrics that will be used to assess quality. These metrics may include customer satisfaction, defect rates, process efficiency, or other relevant measures.
• Collect data such as customer feedback, employee input, and performance metrics. The data is then analyzed to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement. This data can then be compared against established quality standards, industry benchmarks, or other relevant criteria.
• Based on the data analysis, areas for improvement are identified. These may include specific processes, products, or services that need improvement.
• Improvements are then prioritized based on their impact on quality, customer satisfaction and business goals and improvement plans are accordingly implemented.
• Progress of improvement plans is monitored and tracked regularly to ensure they are implemented effectively and achieve the desired outcomes.
• The final step is to review and evaluate the results of the QA assessment. This involves assessing the effectiveness of improvement plans and identifying areas for further improvement.

In summary, the steps involved in conducting a QA assessment include defining objectives, identifying key metrics, collecting, and analyzing data, comparing against standards, identifying areas for improvement, prioritizing improvements, developing, and implementing improvement plans, monitoring progress, and reviewing and evaluating the results. These steps ensure that businesses and organizations can continuously improve their quality and maintain high standards of customer satisfaction.

At Sogeti we have best in class assessment tool to provide an in-depth view of Test Process Quality of any organizations’ IT portfolio. Our holistic framework to assess people, process, and technology around Quality Assurance and how the three elements interact with each other within the engagement, helps businesses to understand if they are achieving optimal organizational efficiency.

The graphical output that leverages insights from assessments to help organizations to improve their test processes and quality assurance mechanisms to achieve higher levels of product quality for the systems they are developing and maintaining.

Contact us for an assessment that will summarize the current state, recommended state, roadmap and solutions.