Spruce Technology’s methods to ensure project quality are anchored in management practices developed over the course of successful large-scale, mission-critical implementation efforts and defined in our corporate best practices documents.

 

Four quality management principles define our quality control (QC) approach:

 

1. Define quality objectively so that we can measure quality attributes that are important to our internal and external clients

2. Do the job right the first time with proven approaches and assets

3. Proactively identify defects and quality issues to minimize their impact on subsequent work

4. Use data to manage quality and focus attention on the targets and goals set by the clients for all deliverables.

 

When Spruce Technology’s Quality Assurance professionals join a project, their approach calls for a series of five distinct activities and reviews that are often conducted at specific intervals in the life of the project:

 

1. Architecture Review: Occurs at the end of each iteration Design phase

2. Design Review: Occurs at the end of each iteration Design phase, and in conjunction with the Architecture Review, if possible.

3. Implementation & Code Review: Occurs during each iteration Implementation phase

4. Milestone Review: Occurs at the end of each iteration Implementation phase

5. Project Close & Review: Occurs at the end of the Project Transition phase, and before the disbanding of the project team

 

Spruce Technology’s framework for quality control involves applying IT security, QA, and configuration management throughout the life of the project. As project activities are accomplished in a controlled manner, our team tracks the cost, performance, risks, and schedule milestones and continually provides status information to the client. Feedback and lessons learned from project tasks and deliverables flow back for use in future project tasks.

 

The Spruce Technology team tailors this approach to meet the specific requirements of projects defined by our clients. We use our proven and mature processes and methodologies to work colla­boratively with our clients for provisioning meaningful stakeholder assessments and for creating and assessing project work plans that undergo regular review for adherence to cost, schedule, and contractual constraints and milestones. Our QA staff perform regularly scheduled project reviews with the client’s management to discuss project status and perform risk and issue management identification through monitoring and reporting.

 

Spruce  Technology’s QA team addresses risk identification and mitigation at all stages of the project and uses trend analysis to help predict potential risks and mitigation strategies before they can be realized and affect critical path or major project milestones. Our professionals use a risk assessment worksheet to identify potential risk and identify potential impacts on cost, schedule, or contract requirements. We then recommend workaround or mitigation strate­gies to address short- and long-term impacts on the project.

 

Spruce Technology uses a variety of tools and forums to provide program and project monitoring control and report­ing, including daily and weekly status meetings, monthly progress reports, and (when required) incident response reporting. We also use a variety of automated monitoring tools that can be web-enabled for man­agement visibility into the real-time statistics that provide insight into the health and operations of specific infrastructure components, hardware, software, network, application layers, and transport layer systems.