Quality Governance
- Strategically aligns IT with business objectives
- Ensures delivery of corporate strategy and goals throughout the enterprise
- Ensures technology investment decisions drive real business value
- Controls IT cost, measures performance and manages risk
- Ensures appropriate IT skills and resources are in place for success
- Ensures compliance
Half of all business investment today is in information and communication technologies, yet IT projects have a reputation for failure. According to Meta Group, more than 75% of line-of-business managers perceive IT to be failing or lacking in credibility. Over 80% of businesses have experienced time and cost overruns or a reduction in the quality of their IT projects.
SQS-UK provides independent consultancy and integrated testing and quality assurance services to help organisations: optimise their IT investments, drive business value, manage risk and deploy Quality Governance successfully.
What Is Quality Governance?
Enterprise Governance is a business-wide framework that details: the objectives of an organisation, its strategy for achieving those objectives and the measures in place for monitoring performance.
IT Governance is an integral element of Enterprise Governance. It provides a structure to ensure that decisions made about IT issues are always aligned with the overall business strategy and culture of the enterprise.
Quality Governance is the foundation for effective IT Governance and is focused on the business processes deployed and the output of those processes. It is the building block for managing the quality of all IT investments.
Why Quality Governance Matters
Quality Governance plays an essential role in preparing businesses to meet their responsibilities. Implemented thoroughly, it ensures that IT projects strike the appropriate balance between budgetary constraints, delivery timescales and quality requirements.
An effective Quality Governance strategy will help ensure that IT:
- Supports an organisation's strategic objectives
- Manages, mitigates or transfers risk
- Contains costs, achieves ROI and proves value
- Improves service levels
- Assists competitive positioning
- Adds value to the organisation's product and service portfolio
- Increases managerial efficiency and effectiveness
- Improves internal communication and administration.
Introducing Quality Governance In Your Business
A Quality Governance strategy must identify and deliver what the business needs to move forward and succeed. SQS-UK helps organisations agree their quality objectives, assess current working practices, identify required improvements, apply constructive methods of measurement/control and gather effective metrics to prove gains in quality and reductions in cost.
The SQS-UK Quality Governance Framework consists of five complementary components, which together create a strategic Governance Control System:
Lifecycle Asset Management - a comprehensive methodology to identify and proactively monitor best practice for the deployment, management and migration of all IT assets
Testing - a rigorous Test Planning and Management process for ensuring that IT products or services will deliver against their performance and ROI criteria
Dashboard - supports decision-making by collating real-time IT metrics, pinpointing improvements delivered and calculating quality achieved in relation to business processes
Quality Management - an independent service to launch, manage and monitor IT projects. Includes: responsibility assignment, outsourcing management, mediation, due diligence, third party vendor assessments and SLA (Service Level Agreement) definition and control
IT Process Management - independent consultancy to benchmark and improve IT performance against industry standards/internal SLAs, identify IT Governance strategy improvements, increase vendor effectiveness and evaluate/implement new IT delivery methods and tools
Deliverables
A fully implemented Quality Governance Framework will prove the value and quality of all existing and future technology projects and investments:
- IT is aligned with business strategy
- IT projects deliver measurable business value and improved ROI
- Ongoing identification of IT project risks
- Optimised development, test, management and IT processes
- Reduced development costs across the IT asset lifecycle
- Software defect identification, redevelopment and cost controls
- Clear IT project reporting and effective communication procedures
