Quality Assurance Services

Maximizing project success through application of risk mitigation and industry best-practices

ISG is the leader in providing Quality Assurance services to governments in the State of Washington. Over the past 7 years, our clients have engaged ISG in this role on 50 different projects. Our QA experience encompasses a broad and diverse array of projects, including implementation of COTS products, custom development efforts, and platform as a service driven initiatives.

Overview

We have provided QA on projects employing traditional waterfall methodology, various agile approaches, and hybrid methodologies. ISG professionals are skilled and experienced in adapting Washington’s QA framework to a variety of methods. We have completed Readiness Assessments, Initial Health Assessments, Recurring Health Assessments, focused/in-depth reviews of key-challenge areas of project performance, Closeout Reports, and Lessons Learned analyses.

We have worked on upgrade projects, deployment of new software, infrastructure, and data center initiatives, transition from on-premise to cloud offerings, and projects with significant external constituencies and users. ISG has leveraged this substantial experience to build an array of standardized templates for QA deliverables and work products that agencies and vendors find easy to both digest and understand the basis for our evaluations, and that minimize the time that our QA teams require to get started.

What Sets Us Apart

Organizations regularly select ISG to serve in a QA capacity on their IT investments due to the high caliber of our resources, the professionalism and thoughtfulness with which we conduct the work, and the value-added insights that we provide that contribute to successful project delivery. We do this through a combination of the following:

Service Brief

We bring a delivery perspective to performing QA work. Our experience is not confined to project oversight. Our professionals have an extensive record of working on integration teams, serving as client and vendor project managers on software implementation, and performing other related roles. This enables our QA teams to provide insight and guidance to our clients that is clearly articulated, practical, based on demonstrated experience, and outcome-oriented.

We use a standard of materiality in performing our QA work. Our teams focus on those aspects of delivery that are critical to the success of IT-driven transformation initiatives. We do not take an audit approach, employing checklists simply to try and identify everything that the project is not doing but should be. Not only are such observations often unhelpful, they can often be counterproductive as they divert time and attention that would be better spent elsewhere. By employing a standard of relevance and priority, ISG QA teams focus on those issues and risks that if left unattended or unresolved, will compromise the project team’s ability to achieve the objectives of the initiative.

ISG works energetically to build credibility with client and vendor project teams. We accomplish this in several ways. First, we take a no surprises approach, making sure that we share our findings and recommendations with project managers and leaders prior to publishing our report. Second, our reports highlight project strengths in addition to opportunities for improvement. This balanced reporting conveys to team members that we report on the things that the project is doing well and therefore, where we have recommendations, that they are offered in the spirit of strengthening project performance to achieve results. Finally, our methodology employs a quantitative approach to assessing project performance, leaving no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation of our evaluations.

Our Commitment

Our QA practitioners are motivated by helping our clients achieve their goals and objectives. We conduct our reviews by evaluating how to approach project challenges from the perspective of asking what would we do if this were our project.

Our QA team is flexible – we focus on those areas of project performance most in need of our attention, and when asked, we go above and beyond the traditional QA role. In some cases, for example, mentoring and guiding client personnel to help them to grow their skills and abilities.

We place a concerted effort on quality – challenging ourselves to validate the accuracy of our observations and working diligently to propose solutions that are the right fit for our clients and their projects.

Ultimately, we work to be forward focused, helping our clients anticipate likely challenges and providing proven techniques to efficiently and effectively address them.