As said rightly; striving for quality is a journey without destination!

At United Software Associates; we have bagged the international quality certifications for maintaining the quality standards as per their frame works.

We are now focused on improving our operational excellence by enhancing our Software engineering execution excellence as per CMMi (SEI’s Capability Maturity Model) framework. It helps us to predict quality of our deliverables!

United Software Associates is going ahead with CMMi Level 5 certification for its quality process deployment. We have already bagged ISO 27001 certification for Information Security Management.

Security framework deployment makes our work environment fully secured for customers’ private business data and our delivery management becomes robust and safe from customers’ perspective.

The assessments for certification are conducted by external auditors well known in the IT world.

Right the first time, is the main objective in striving for this excellence which helps in eliminating the rework, improve in productivity, deliver on time using right amount of efforts and naturally in right cost.

Measurements and Metrics

Under Quality deployment umbrella, we have many measures and metrics for quantifying our performance. Our Development and QA dashboards cover all the needed measurements those talk about our technical and engineering products and process performance.

Development Dashboard covers following measures on weekly basis -

• Schedule Variance
• Efforts Variance
• % of Tasks completion status
• Earned Value Analysis
• Peer review coverage
• Requirements Volatility
• Unit testing efficiency

Development Dashboard covers following measures after project completion -

Team performance measures

• % of project completion by team member
• Task based effort variance by each team member
• Number of defects as per peer review efficiency
• Defects Turnaround Time
• Rework efforts
• Individual performance of team member based on quality deliverables

QA Dashboard covers following measures on project completion –

• Total % of test coverage for the AUT (Application Under testing)
• Test efforts variance
• Total defects logged in with severity
• Stage wise / Phase wise % of defects logged in
• Test Cycle specific % of defects
• Defect Acceptance Ratio
• Defect Leakage Ratio
• QA Team performance
  • % of defects logged by team members
  • Number of test scenarios executed per day by team members
  • Productivity of QA Team members

Extensive measurement and tracking and identification of Root Causes for elimination of recurrence of the same issues are the goal for all teams and their deliverables.

Continuous improvement and learning is our Goal for quality improvement !

Delivery of solutions from proposal to deployment using disciplined process based approach makes United Software Associates successful in the business.

Project planning, execution, monitoring and tracking and closure for retrospective learning as per PMI standards is our roadmap to excel in project Management.

Estimation of work, right scoping, scheduling, planning and tracking makes our project execution more than transparent to our esteemed customers.

Weekly reporting and tracking, mitigating the risks in right time, controlling the deviations with right preventive and corrective action in project management is what we believe takes the project to successful execution.

The art of Learning from our Project Management experience is valuable for us and for our organization knowledgebase development.

Usages of robust and well established tools in the market make our business deliverables more disciplined.

The practice of our project management philosophy of developing operational transparency in business encourages us to focus more on using tools and techniques those are reusable and versatile.

We, at United Software Associates believe in striving for this tools based transparency.

Our tools’ repository has been more versatile and well equipped because it consists of tools which are either internally developed and prepared or procured from readily available lot from market as well as freeware available over the net.

We use tools for estimations; project planning, scheduling, management, Defect tracking, Risk tracking and Engineering practices based tracking activities.

We have internal tools / dashboards customized for our measurements and metrics.

We use Quality Centre, QTP, Lotus Notes, Bugzilla, TFS and Rally for our multi faced engineering processes.

At United Software Associates, we are committed to follow CMMi processes for complete program management.

Enterprise Solutions management from proposal to delivery is governed by systematic program management.

Program management is a combination of processes, tools, practices and right combination of customer involvement, stake holder involvement at right time.

Communication management

Communication is the crux of the outsourced business development and business deliverables.

In today’s world of internet; we have defined a global communication policy that focuses on –

• Making our teams available for giving significant hours of overlap time with our customers for the different time zones.
• Use of IMs for discussing and clarifying small queries as a part of work routine.
• Use of weekly, Bi-weekly telecom based meeting followed by VOIP calls as and when needed.
• Usage of GoToMeeting sessions, web based meetings for conducting demos, trainings, meetings and walkthroughs.

Communication by Reporting

Achieving customer delight can be possible only when customer is assured of work quality and disciplined timeframe- based reporting by us.

Reporting is inevitable in ODC!

• Our communication of work status on daily basis by sending DSR (Daily Status Report), WSR (Weekly Status Report) on every Friday end of the day and Milestone specific Report (Monthly Status Report) talk about our integrity and commitment to work.
• Customer is completely aware of the work status that helps the customer to plan ahead for their business commitments based on our reports.
• Metrics based dashboard is sent on weekly basis and milestone basis to know where we are with respective facts / figures and numbers.
• Usage of GoToMeeting sessions, web based meetings for conducting demos, trainings, meetings and walkthroughs.

For us this art of good Program Management leads to delighted Customers and that is our business Goal!

Projects without risks do not exist.

Early marketing by all the global organizations has been a part of our IT Life.

To achieve this business objectives by our customers; our continuous risk management is very crucial.

Internal excel based tool helps all the project and program managers to identify organization level, project level and resource level risks with well-defined mitigation and contingency plans.

This is unique in our deliverables and hence we ensure that we manage risks so well that we help our customer to market their applications and products as early as possible.

Every project brings in learning for us.

We build our organization knowledgebase of learning after every project closure.

Learn from our execution cycle and ensure that we do better and better each time in our delivery management to excellence in operations.

As said earlier striving quality is a journey without destination.

Deployment of PDCA cycle for continuous improvement is our way of life in United Software Associates.

Continuous learning leads management to define better strategy each time year by year to define our organization growth path.

By continuous learning we show the difference in delivery management to excel in Operational Excellence!