Improving Quality Assurance In Large Information Systems Departments

The ISO standards for quality assurance have helped many organizations in setting up a quality system and thereby in improving the quality of their processes and products. However, setting up a quality system on the basis of these standards also requires interpretation and tuning of the guidelines towards the specific needs of an organization. It is this practical implemen- tation of a quality system that we treat in this paper. In particular, we deal with the improvement of ISO-conforming quality systems for large information systems (development) departments. It appears that these quality systems do not always work as they should and that they can often be improved. First we describe a number of problems and possible improvements that we perceived in practice. We trace these back to mismatches between the perceived characteristics of the ISO standards for quality systems and the requirements of large IS departments. In principle that need not be a problem, because the ISO standards leave much freedom of implementation. However the mismatches may (and often do) lead to misinterpretation or wrong tuning of the guidelines. Then we show how that can be avoided. In order to do so, we first describe critical success factors of ISO-conforming quality systems in large IS-departments. Then we describe how a quality system can be made to conform to those success factors. We treat each of the main components of a quality system (quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and a quality information system) and show how they can be implemented more successfully by matching an organization's characteristics.