Why A Test Centre Of Excellence?

Why a Test Centre of Excellence (TCE)? Introduction In today’s financial climate we need to reduce cost and headcount. How can this be accomplished with the implementation of a Test Centre of Excellence (TCE)? A TCE brings testing specialists together, as required, to ensure the proper software testing techniques are applied to your business. How can this be accomplished? By creating process and procedures together with a group of testing specialists with the required technical testing components that can be used to leverage testing knowledge, technology, methodology and resources across your business, thus reducing cost across your business. The TCE structure gives the testing effort the discipline required to supply your business with an accurate answer to the question of where are you and what needs to be improved. This allows for informed decision making on the implementation and support of your testing processes.

TCE Pyramid

Why a Test Centre of Excellence (TCE)?

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What is a TCE? The TCE brings together a dedicated team of domain experts and enables your business to identify core patterns of integration, share best practices, leverage skills and standardise tools across your organisation. A TCE provides a central source of standardised products, assessments, templates etc, & services with expertise, and best practices. It can also provide your entire organisation with visibility into quality and performance helping to keep everyone informed and keeping your Applications under Test (AuT) and services aligned with your business objectives. The strategy and roadmap for TCE are required to launch and sustain your business needs. Without a TCE, you will lack the necessary system and opportunity to optimise resources, funding, competencies, and governance structure, therefore the TCE should be in sync with the philosophy of your organisation.

ISO 29119 Full Test Process

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Why is a TCE required? Creating a TCE is a proven, yet flexible approach to obtain the strategic benefits of business in all its forms, while maintaining a control on costs, quality and operation. TCE can bring tremendous benefits to your organisation, by creating the necessary state of art to provide service and product excellence for your customers and users. TCE is used to provide the best technical solutions to your challenging, complex, and evolving business needs. There are various reasons why you should create a TCE and the most common are as follows: •

To keep pace with technologies and their impact on your business.

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Creating a TCE addresses the need of how to maximise the use of hardware, software and highly skilled personnel to provide solutions.

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A TCE enables a centralise technology as well as creates a repository of solutions, and reusable components, sharing best practices and a knowledge base. Reuse of technology in some cases can be leveraged across different segments of your business.

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It provides timely information, measures, KPI’s to the users and senior management throughout the organisation enabling them to take appropriate and timely decisions in competitive advantage.

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You can use the TCE to enable implementation of all needed regulatory requirements and best practises.

Setting up a TCE Setting-up of a TCE requires a coordinated effort across the dimensions of people, process, technology and management’s continuous support and commitment to convert TCE as a business solution centre or asset. One of the key advantages in setting-up of the TCE is that it can be built with minimal incremental expenditure and service-product mix. You can evolve and scale up its resources, services, and capabilities progressively as its values are delivered to your business.

Objectives of setting-up a TCE Organisations have to set clear goals while creating TCE to protect the investments and fulfil the business objectives. Typically the following are the common examples of setting goals for TCE: •

Create a unique platform for creating testing solutions

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Implement the vision of providing a single place where users can access all services, information, reports, KPIs, scorecards and other metrics essential for their business requirements. Create a standard vehicle for deployment of best practices

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Develop and apply research, innovative technologies for development / maintenance and support services

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Integration of services to address multi site, multi location requirements and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

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Establish norms for an organisation and enhance user productivity. Promote and ensure that the reusable-assets / templates are produced. Optimise the use of all products and services implemented in a cost-effective manner, contributing to the overall success of your Organisation

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Provide a more comprehensive, reliable, and adaptable hardware and software solutions in order to speed their time-to-market

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Delivery of strategic business value through technical excellence, process excellence and leveraging economies of scale

How to Choose an Implementation Path Planning the implementation of TCE isn’t a small task. Because there is organisational change involved, there are many aspects which need to be considered. Fortunately, you can take an incremental approach for implementing a TCE. Companies that are successful in implementing a TCE have not only focused on current problems that need to be resolved but also on the long term business benefits such as, reduced cost or improved timeto-market. The implementation of TCE includes major activities such as: •

Finding a champion to drive the TCE with proven ability to deliver.

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Communicating to management the long-term vision and value of the TCE

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Finding the appropriate funding model

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Manage organisational changes and communicate the right message to stakeholders

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Building new skill sets

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Creation of strong governance and operational model

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Development of a system-level management dashboard, reporting and alert tracking mechanism

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Implementing industry standards, quality models and best practices. Documentation and control of major processes and procedures supported by your business rules

Business benefits of TCE •

The key question for many CIOs today is not whether the TCE approach would benefit the organisation, but rather how best to make the transition to the TCE model from existing state. Those who have followed disciplined approach towards setting–up and implementing TCE successfully have realised many business benefits. TCE offers the means to coordinate the effort by creating a common set of resources, models and tools to meet the broad set of business needs—while taking advantage of existing organisation expertise, standards and infrastructure.

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Creating a TCE helps to decrease and optimise technology costs, increase organisational efficiency due to shared resources; more quickly comply with reporting regulations, and improve overall business agility.

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The TCE enables organisations to set up and operate centralised technologies and utilise effectively a repository of seamless business knowledge and best practices, sharing of which reduces the learning curve for the team members as learning is shared across the projects.

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It also improves the productivity of teams across the enterprise.

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By defining, measuring and acting on KPIs, TCE helps keep the product and services aligned tightly with business needs

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Career advancement: The TCE model creates a compelling new career opportunity for IT professionals, helping the organisation recruit and retain top talent.

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Consistency: Standardising quality best practices helps ensure consistent, cost-effective, and rapid implementation of optimised quality processes.

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Practicality: Building a Quality TCE is an achievable goal. You can start on a small scale, leveraging existing resources, and expand its capabilities as the value is proven.

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Automation and appropriate management control of TCE lowers the cost of ownership and minimises the disruptions to business while improving quality of delivery and business responsiveness resulting in competitive advantages

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Culture of quality: The transition from islands of expertise to standardised quality processes and toolsets helps focus the organisation on quality issues and speeds the evolution to a culture of quality.

Conclusion Think of the TCE as the holder of the keys to the business success. Mature organisations have mature practices and engage which needs constant improvement. The TCE model has already proven its value in hundreds of IT Organisations worldwide. The TCE is an efficient change agent, driving optimisation in the organisation. Individual initiatives and attempts to achieve better quality in delivery typically have a very limited visibility, scope and impact as an organisation; moreover there are often major roadblocks to implementing them. Deploying and evolving a TCE enables ways to improve quality and performance of its product and service delivery in an organised way, at their own pace, while simultaneously cutting costs. It provides greater visibility by measuring its outcome and comparing the same with its business goals. TCE provides economies of scale along with reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TOC). It provides maximum realisation of an integration investment, made by your organisation.

Author Gary Grung is a Test Governance specialist and an independent official reviewer for ISO 29119 Part 2. Contact him on [email protected]

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