Securing Quality
Crossover is made up of a large network of team rooms, each dedicated to it's own specific segment of products. Typically we have several team rooms involved in each stage and all of them have to be sure that they provide perfect quality outputs as inputs for the next team room.
We check quality before and after each team, so we can be sure that our customers get the best quality we can provide. The way we do that is through creating and enforcing objective quality bars.
Quality Bars
Quality Bars are checklists that help you rule out typical mistakes of the team rooms. There are three types of Quality Bars: Input, Internal and External Quality Bars. Look at the following diagram how these relate to each other.
External Quality Bar
The External Quality Bar (EQB) contains the objective list requirements from your customers. This is the most important quality bar because failures directly affect customer satisfaction.
NPS as External Quality Bar
NPS is used for measuring customer experience and business growth. For instance, if you are a customer support agent, after you closed a ticket, your customers would receive an email for rating their experience with the ticket:
If a customer gives 9 or 10, that is considered a good experience. That customer would probably Promote your services to his/her network, and that would help your business to grow.
7-8 are considered Passive customers who are satisfied but you might lose them to competitors in case they have better offers.
0-6 are considered Detractors, who would complain about your service that would affect their network negatively, and decreases chances for growing your business.
Such a measurement is very helpful for identifying improvement areas. However, note that not all customers respond to NPS surveys. Therefore NPS is an indicator, but it doesn't show the whole picture.
Read here to learn how NPS is calculated, and here to learn pro's and con's of NPS.
Internal Quality Bar
The internal Quality Bar (IQB) will ensure that the unit your team produces is at the best possible quality. It usually contains the External Quality Bar (to be aligned with the requirements by your customers) and some additional QB items that will prevent your team’s typical mistakes.
The Internal Quality Bar should always be higher than the External QB, to ensure that our customers get the best possible products. External quality bar can be the internal quality bar of the downstream team in the factory. If you are facing customers, then it can be Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Input Quality Bar
The Input Quality Bar will ensure that you get only inputs that you can actually work with. For example, a QAManualTesting execution team needs “proper” written test cases to execute.
The “proper” is what we objectively define with the Input Quality Bar. In this case, it means that the test cases have at least 5 steps and each of them has a screenshot attached showing the expected results - without this, the team can’t proceed.
Playbooks
Every team room in the factory has a playbook. This document captures the purpose and the most important processes of a team room. It also contains the team room owners’ information and typically contains strategies for the ICs to unblock themselves. When you join a team room, reading the playbook should be the first thing you do.
Quality Enforcement Teams
Teams in the factory typically have Quality Enforcement teams. These are specialized teams that double check every single unit that the main team produces against the internal Quality Bar. This team allows us to have a clear picture of our teams’ quality and helps us drive objective decisions based on data.
When the team's Quality Enforcement Team fails a unit, it's a failure on the Internal Quality Bar, because the client/next team in the factory will not receive a faulty unit.
Quizzes
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