What is quality from our viewpoint and why is it important?

In the world of software implementation projects, ensuring quality is crucial. At 2BCS AG, we believe in a positive, proactive, and supportive approach to quality management, aimed at empowering the business that is implementing a software, subsequently called customer. In this article, we explore the essence of customer-driven quality assurance in software implementation projects, its responsibilities, and potential measures to ensure success.

The Goal of Quality Assurance (QA)

Often in implementation projects, software implementers focus their quality assurance efforts on coding. Remaining Quality assurance tasks mainly fall to the customer. At the heart of customer-driven quality assurance in implementation projects lies the goal of ensuring that the business receives software that fits to the target processes and is future-proof / upgradeable. Quality assurance is not only focused on documents and work practices, but also aims to empower project team members to do so themselves. Quality cannot be ensured by one person – It is about fostering a culture of quality throughout the organization.

Responsibilities and measures of Quality Assurance

Quality assurance encompasses a wide range of responsibilities. Often driven by the customer, such responsibilities include coordinating quality assurance, ensuring quality gates, embedding customer-specific quality standards and many more.

The before-mentioned responsibilities cause targeted measures. Namely, a quality concept, a quality plan, periodic quality checks and reviews are considered to be effective measures.

Let us especially focus on a measure that is often overlooked by an implementer: Periodic Quality Reviews. These reviews provide a view of the project's quality at predefined milestones and checkpoints. They involve a thorough examination of project processes, documentation, and work practices. Such reviews may be held internally or together with the implementer. Generally, it is important to track effectiveness of a periodic quality review. This can be achieved by tracking KPI`s such as project satisfaction with the project management and implementors consultants.

Final Thoughts

Quality assurance is the cornerstone of success in software implementation projects and often overlooked by the implementor. Customer-driven quality assurance empowers project teams to enforce the customer expectations, deliver high-quality results, and minimize risks. 2BCS AG believes in a proactive, supportive, and positive approach to quality management, to help organizations increase their chances of achieving success in software implementation projects.