People often ask us how they can begin implementing a QA process at their company. The response is: It depends. Where are you in the organization? Are you a decision maker or a worker bee? Either way you have the ability to begin the process of change.

While it is obviously easier for the decision maker to make waves in the current process a worker bee has the ability to empower the decision maker above them to rock the boat. Why? Because process is the tool that gives you the ability to get your work done. Most managers will listen if you tell them how you can be more efficient, after all making sure you get your work done efficiently is part of their job. I am not saying that you need to walk into their office and say, “Let’s adopt Agile tomorrow because it will make me more efficient!” that would be impossible. Start with some realistic requests. For example, you might say, “Boss, the next project is getting kicked off this week, if you could get me invited to the requirements discussions it would really help me understand the product better and therefore I would be able to write better tests more efficiently when the time comes.” Your direct manager may not be aware that if you had originally spent an hour listening to a requirements review you would not have to be spending an hour now trying to track down someone who remembers what decision was made 5 months ago. If your boss says that there is a project resource or budget issue with doing this, track down the Project Manager and apply the same technique.

So, how can you empower change at your company? Can you get involved with something today that will help steer your project or corporate process in a quality direction?

-- Charity