Build a Culture of Quality With These Original Communication Tools
I share some of my most creative ideas for building a quality culture in your company.
When I started as QA Manager, most of the development team had never seen a QA in their lives. Everyone had their idea of quality. Some had none, some had too much, and in between, I had to be the voice of truth.
At first, I struggled to get my message across. Working full remote added even more challenges. So I worked on my communication strategy, used a range of tools to amplify my impact, and it paid off.
Tested and approved, these tools have allowed me to repeat the same messages over and over again but in different forms so that in the end, they get into people’s heads.
First of all, find your allies
This is the cheapest and most effective technique. Start with this one right away as it will help you later on.
Discuss with all your colleagues and identify those who are most sensitive to your speech. Empower them to carry the culture by naming them “referent of” or by recognizing their efforts to improve quality. The more allies you have, the easier it will be to “convert” others.
You also need to be clear with your hierarchy. All senior positions are aligned with your vision of quality as they will best convey your message and support you in all your initiatives. If they do not align with your goal, consider it unattainable or even lost.
Repeat your message: The tools
Explaining your objectives to everyone in an internal chat line will never be enough. You need to hammer home your goals in different ways and use every moment of the day to remind everyone what doing quality means.
Another pain point we want to solve here: When managing a single team, it is relatively easy to get a consensus on good practice. But when you have several teams, coherence is much harder to achieve.
How can we be sure that everyone is aligned? Everywhere, all the time?
I will give you 4 tools, from the simplest to the most complex to implement, that will help you get your message across and increase your influence in your organization.
Great Presentations: The Connector
Presentations are powerful tools to create moments of connection with your team while getting back to basics together.
For example, start talking about the costs of the biggest bugs in history, it’s impressive, it’s attention-grabbing, and it is also the kind of first course on quality assurance that a teacher does. Then bring the subject back to your company: what are the risks of poor quality in your company? What are the costs and for whom?
Then finish with the solutions. What can be done? Of course, you have already prepared the solutions, but ensure that your colleagues make the effort to find them.
Internal Newsletter: The Informer
This method was suggested to me by my manager at the time and, as a writing enthusiast, I loved the idea. It keeps your team informed at the same level of detail.
Send your newsletter every week or two weeks, to celebrate the team’s success, challenges to come, and best practices, and to let everyone know about the last updates of your tools and process.
I also like to add, as an extra part, great articles written by people outside the company. For example, articles related to our current topics, or very inspiring articles to transmit my passion for quality.
One last big advantage that I didn’t realize before doing this newsletter is that you can see who has read it using the metrics in your newsletter manager. This is very valuable information to know who is less responsive to your message.
Some advice if you start with it :
- Keep it short and clear.
- Focus, in the first part, on one big message.
- Have fun, try things, and do not make this newsletter boring.
- Ask for feedback after sending, from your manager or people you trust.
Dashboards: The navigator
If you spend some time at the office and you have monitors, I know there are still places like this, real time dashboards are a good tool to reinforce quality culture.
Think of your daily dashboards as a navigation map that will keep you on track. Show where you need to focus your efforts: Test coverage? Critical issues? Time to resolve? You have the choice.
For more information on the setup of these dashboards, please have a look at my article Build Quality Assurance Dashboards: Metrics, Design and Tools.
Slack Bot: The Reminder
A lot of discussions take place in the chat room and it’s often messy. It is difficult to find one’s way through between private messages and long threads. Here again, you can do something to promote a culture of quality.
One of the benefits of an internal chat is that you can use bots to assist you. This is how I took advantage of it to support my intentions in terms of quality.
A reminder for tickets to assign, analyze and fix
Many of our bugs were not traced. They were fixed “on the fly”, without prioritization, which added a huge defocus on the development teams.
So I set up a system so that every bug that came up would go through a bug tracker, to be handled properly. By using such tools I was able to automate notifications to our Slack and display them once or twice a day relevant information for our support management.
It helped the organization of the support but it also shared continuously the same message: Let’s be organized, transparent, and focus on our responsibilities.
In this reminder you can see many points of attention:
- Is a ticket already analyzed? prioritized? assigned?
- If a ticket is major or critical, where is it in terms of SLA?
A resume of the week
With all the data retrieved from the bug tracker, I was finally able to communicate accurate information on how we were handling our issues throughout the week, a real joy.
Through these automated messages, I was able to get my quality messages across:
- Organization of the support service
- Alignment with our KPIs
- Transparency
“Et voilà”. I hope I have inspired you with all these ideas. No one is better than another. Try to find the one that works best for you and, most importantly, tell me about it. Let me know what you’ve done. What worked for you? What didn’t?
And if you want to know more about a particular communication tool, don’t hesitate to talk about it in the comments, it might be the subject of another article.
