Our back story with the client
Our client is an IPTV implementer. In concrete words, they sell a software that manages anything that appears in networks of thousands of company-owned TVs. They thus often sell this solution to large franchise companies that have stores, hotels, or restaurants in different locations.
We first acted as project managers to implement thousands of their licences at end-client’s side over several projects.
We were in the field, seeing and experiencing our stakeholders’ challenges in real time.
This led us to step up in responsibilities for higher level projects thanks to trust built with teams and management.
Situation:
The organizations our clients sell its services to all have all different, complex IT environments. Thus, our client’s IPTV solution needs to be tailor-made to be connected to these various, complex, and different IT environments.
However, every time a new version of the software would be put into production, lots of bugs would thus be reported. Our client didn’t have a proper testing department to manage all quality assurance before solutions were shipped.
This meant:
- Low client satisfaction due to paid features that aren’t working
- Huge workload & stress on customer service, and post-prod development to solve bug
- Lots of time lost in back and forth to solve issue, and sooth client frustration
Challenge of our client
As the company grew, our client wanted to restructure the way they were working to better deliver value to their end clients. Fortunately, our years of presence in the field gave us:
- a solid trust from management,
- an overview of the operations and process,
- a good understanding of customer pain points.
Drawing from the client pain points observed, we proposed that this restructuration could be an opportunity to create a Quality & Assurance department from scratch.
It would improve end-client satisfaction, by standardizing and automatizing a team to:
- test software before release
- foresee issues before they impact business-as-usual
- limit the number of bugs in production
Approach
Our role was to be the business & management counterpart of the operations, bridging gaps between sales, operations, developers and of course, end-clients.
For anything that was tech-related (testing & development), we joined forces with the tech experts from our ecosystem, the Positive Thinking Company.
QA Department scope definition
Despite having lots of ideas, we were starting from a blank page.
Our first task was thus to define & align on the scope of the complex software we had on our hands. We analyzed together the application and all its functionalities, until the lowest functional level. That left us with a tree structure of all the requirements that we’d have to manage with the department.
QA Department set up
Thanks to that defined scope, we could move to the next phase: to benchmark and select tools that were fit for our purpose.
Due to the medium size of our client, we strived since the start to automatize as much things as possible. Automatization was a huge difference factor in both choosing the right tools and how the department would operate later on.
Using a set of plugins of the Atlassian suite, we created our first QA test scenarios, that would then be automatized.
Likewise, we implemented a crawling bot that would compare theoretical design (from client requirements) and practical design (from templates we have done already). Thanks to this process, each project has now a set of software design requirements listed automatically.
End Results
The QA department is now operational and running. After a high workload at the start, it operates now almost independently: we only keep a high-level view on the operations.
Its main purpose is now to create demonstration IT environments to test and present projects to the client’s leads during the Proof-of-Concept phase.
The numbers of bugs in post-production phase are now reduced by 75%. Despite being IT-focused by design, the department bridges gap between business with end-clients, as its creation now leads to:
- More professional image of our client
- Less stress for end-clients; overall confidence in solution rose.
- Less time waited for bugs solving,
- Less frustration at each updates
- Better compatibility with customer environments
- Proof of concept, stability, and certainty of end deliverables
- Less time spent on customer service for issue solving
Next steps
As our role in the QA department has progressively decreased, we now help our client to improve its main solution regarding:
Product/market fit & stakeholder management
- Case revisions
- Customer market demands analysis & integration
- Competition analysis
- IT workloads estimation
- Release prioritisation & validation
Improvement of customer support processes:
- Product Development roadmap mapping & improvements
- Reviewing all Service Level Agreements with end-clients
- Fluidify integration process on client side
- Reduce time spent by support on recurring questions
- Make sure everyone works on right features at the right moment
Certification for ISO 9001 / 27001 with the help of a specialized third party
- Process guidelines requirements
- Classification & versioning of documentation
- Mapping ASIS Project Management Processes
- Complementary documentations as needed
- Following up on ISO tasks
