A major company in the entertainment industry was having significant problems with the proprietary software products that supported their back office operations.  Back office staff were frustrated with the poor quality of these products and the perceived unresponsiveness of the IT Department, and a recent audit had found that significant overpayments had been issued because of problems with this software.  The company knew that they had to take action to improve the quality of these critical software products. 

ESTM performed a comprehensive assessment of the IT Department and the company's approach to software development.  We found that the department was swamped with problem reports and requests for new features, making prioritization difficult, and was under pressure to quickly release new versions of the software.  In addition, the department's approach to quality assurance was solely focused on manual testing, and this was often scaled back to meet schedule deadlines.  As a result of both issues, new releases of the software  failed to address critical issues and needs, and contained new problems. 

ESTM worked with the IT organization to develop a pragmatic, cost-effective approach to quality assurance that integrated QA into all stages of the software development process, improved the identification, prioritization and tracking of user requirements, significantly strengthened the efficiency and thoroughness of testing, and established measurable, objective release criteria and a rigorous release procedure.  ESTM worked with IT and back office management and staff to build support for the new approach, developed a deployment plan, and facilitated the establishment of this process across the organization.

The new approach improved the IT Department's ability to meet user requirements,  ensured that new releases contained critical problem resolutions and new software features with a high return on investment, significantly reduced the number of post-release problems, greatly improved the overall quality of the software over time, and considerably improved teamwork and cooperation between the IT and back office organizations.