Delivering 100% Quality

In a remote environment, you can’t show how much you work or how hard you are trying just by being the first in the office and the last to leave. In a remote environment, your manager and the customers will only care about the output you deliver. When the content you’re creating is bad quality, all subsequent team rooms, and even the customer might feel its effect.

If your quality failure is discovered in the next team room (probably the Quality Enforcement team), then the ticket will come back to you and then back to that team again. The later it gets discovered, the more rework it will require by every team, but even worse: the higher the chance it has to reach the customer. In Crossover, your #1 target is to deliver perfect units.

How can I ensure delivering perfect units?

100% quality can be intimidating first. However, our organization is built on objective, clear, content-focused internal quality bars that will help you ensure your success.

First of all, you have to read and internalize the quality bar of your team. Quality bars are created typically by identifying customer needs and discovering returning mistakes of a team. You should use it as a learning opportunity and a cheat sheet of clear requirements.

Before you submit a unit (a bug fix, a test case, a report, etc), check and ensure that it passes every single item in your team’s QB. If you make sure of it, the next team won’t need to send the unit back for rework and you ensured customer satisfaction in your piece of work.

Take responsibility

When failing a unit, the natural response from most people is to blame it on the QE (Quality Enforcement) team - but unfortunately, the QE team is almost always right. The best approach is to take it as negative feedback, take responsibility immediately and seek ways to improve. You have to rewire your brain and think about ways to avoid the same mistake again.

What if you fail on the same quality bar item twice, even three times? Maybe for you, it’s just not enough to double check the quality bar, because you still keep missing it. In this case, reach out to your manager and seek help. He will surely give you some best practices/common solutions to your issue - maybe the two of you can come up with new ways to avoid this problem for the whole team room.

In the rare case, when your argument against the QE team is right, it’s typically caused by a subjective quality bar item that leaves room for misinterpretation. In such cases, it’s worth debating the quality bar item itself - (not its application on your unit).

Debating the Quality Bars

It is possible that a quality bar is outdated, not objective, unclear or just straight-up wrong. If you find the QB to be wrong, the worst thing you can do is to just not apply it, because you feel like it.

This ruins the structure and the process all team rooms apply and will make impact analysis harder for changes. It will also ruin your FTAR (First-Time Acceptance Rate), which is the quality indicator for every contractor at Crossover.

If you discover such a case, you still have to apply the current quality bar for your units, but please reach out to your manager and discuss your problems with the QB. If the QB is correct, you learn something - if it’s not, then the whole organization will benefit from your discovery.