How will you answer to a common man’s question upon your profession?
Suppose, you are a Quality engineer. But if a person who is not at all related to IT world asks you about your job, how will you answer?
I thought about the same in many dimensions.
Hmm.. It is easy to have a complex definition.. but It is pretty difficult to make it a simpler one
So coming back to the Question, “Who is a Process Engineer/Process consultant/Quality Engineer”?
We all are working based on certain discipline.
Companies are also not at all an exception. They are abiding to some standards. Sometimes they make their own standards and follow the policies inline to those standards.
Otherwise they seek compliance to industry wide accepted standards and models like ISO, CMMI, ASPICE, TL 9000, FDA, AS 9100 etc.
Sometimes they even go for certification or assessment against these standards, so that they can proudly claim that “we are compliant to ISO xxx etc” and definitely which will be an added value in front of the clients.
Now who will be monitoring the compliance on a long run? Disciplines are to be ensured life long, right?
Similarly companies need to ensure that the defined policies are implemented and updated on a regular basis. If the responsibility is shared among each and every employee, it will end nowhere and ultimately everything is diluted.
So companies keep a separate group known as process consultant or QA engineers.
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They mainly help the organization to comply with these standards.
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They train the employees on the implementation part.
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They write policies and procedures and ensure that it is shared to relevant people.
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They ensure that these policies are practiced inside the projects through proper audits.
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They escalate the issues and update the status to senior management.
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They initiate corrective actions and preventive actions whenever required.
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The job does not end here. If the company had gone for certification/assessment this team plays a main role for an easy go.
So this is the bare minimum responsibility of a QA engineer. And depending upon the organization, tasks vary. There are consultants who do data analysis and come up with interesting facts about the organization.
So in short, QA team is the team who ensures process compliance within an organization.
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