How to setup a successful large Testing CoE - Part-1 ?

How to setup a successful large Testing CoE - Part-1 ?

Kalilur Rahman Kalilur Rahman

Kalilur Rahman

Director @ Novartis | IT Strategy, IT Management, Business Transformation

发布日期: 2014年12月19日
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Aristotle once famously quoted -

"Well Begun is half done".

This profound statement is an eternal truth in pretty much everything we do. To add another quote by Chankaya from Artha shastra is -

Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions - Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead. - Chanakya

This is accurate even when we start large scale transformation programmes. I've had opportunities to work on some complex transformation programmes and thought of sharing the wisdom I gathered via my experiences.

Starting a Testing Centre of Excellence for your customer needs to be understood and addressed from your customer's point of you. Drawing from the quote from Chankya - You need to understand

  • What your customer is currently doing - Have an understanding of the Business
    • What is the customer's position, business, finance, competition, roadmap, product and services vision etc.
  • The maturity of delivery framework - This may wary for different clients and this is very important to be understood before we can recommend
    • Some of your clients may have very solid process and methodology in place - could be less agile
    • some could have best of both worlds with limited process with a sense of urgency
    • some may have a sense of urgency and getting things done with a lesser focus on quality with a fix-it-in-live mentality
    • some may have a tremendous focus on quality but do not have enough resources, know-how in-house to do it
    • some may have a stable delivery process but are in expansion mode with a focus to streamline operations with best-in-class service and reduced cost of operations
    • Etc.
  • Roadmap
    • What your customer wants to achieve in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years
      • How does the TCoE fit into the entire mix
    • What are the Cost, Quality, Maturity, Agility levers for the clients in terms of roadmap?
  • Challenges your clients want to address

 

Once you understand what your customer wants to achieve, you are on a good track to recommend how you could help them. You can perform an assessment - using your tools/processes or generic frameworks such as TMMi, TMap etc and understand where they fit and address what you can address.

You also need to understand that having good sales personnel may get you the deal over your competitors. however, unless you have levers to address an "apples vs. oranges" scenario between due-diligence and delivery phase to address commercial challenges, it will be a difficult challenge from day-1 to begin with. Plan with the end in mind. Plan and Prices the Solution to Deliver what you promise to the client to reach a win-win situation for both you and clients.

Some of the typical pitfalls you need to avoid include are

 

 

 

To be continued with more points to come in my next post. Comments are welcome.

Note: All comments and opinions expressed (other than facts referred from sources) are personal opinions of the author.

Image Credits: Free images sourced from stockphotosforfree.com.

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