Quality guide
Quality service is provided in a safe, effective, member-centric, timely, equitable, and recovery-oriented fashion. We seek to delight our members and clients with dazzling responses and services.
We are committed to the ongoing improvement of the quality our members receive evidenced by the outcomes we create and their view of our service.
Our policy is to continually improve all aspects of our services through:
- Adherence to all relevant laws
- Continual engagement of stakeholders in developing the service
- Constant searching for best practice by our team
- Processes designed to track bugs and errors
- Being open, honest and willing to continually improve
and to achieve best or next practice in all that we do.
Responsibilities
The Directors have assigned responsibility for maintaining this guide and the quality assurance systems as follows:
- Chairman: All external customer and contributor related, non-technical quality assurance.
- Secretary: All internal technical systems quality assurance.
Priorities
Our prioritization for making changes to our service are:
- Legally must do
- Security
- Bugs/fixes/errors/faults
- Client requested improvements
- Growth
Success criteria
We endeavor to make our success criteria SMART:
- Specific - objectives are clearly defined
- Measurable - objectives are capable of being measured
- Achievable - objectives are stretching but achievable
- Results-orientated - plans are improvement rather than activity focused
- Time-bound - specific dates and times are set for meeting objectives
Legally must do
- We monitor legal changes world-wide through our weekly review of added Insights and through taking professional advice. Any legally required changes are added to our development priority list. Directors review the development list on at least an eight-week cycle and establish priorities accordingly.
Privacy
We respect and protect the privacy of the individuals that use our services. We do not disclose personal information to any third party without first receiving permission, as explained in our privacy statement.
Bugs/fixes/errors
Systems releases are fully tested using our User Acceptance Testing procedure on our demo server, not the live site. Any bugs/fixes or errors identified are resolved immediately before put live,
- Post release bugs/fixes and errors are fixed immediately.
- The service has a number of feedback mechanisms to support the reporting of issues liberally distributed throughout the site:
Contact us | Feedback | Directors phone numbers | Comment on our service | Complain |
- An inner circle of trusted and knowledgeable experts in our market reviews the service. Their comments and ideas are also added to our development priorities.
- We maintain a log of systems breakdowns and always hold a post-mortem on the cause in order to maintain a fault-free environment.
- Depending on the seriousness of an issue this is communicated directly to clients.
Client requested improvements
We log these requested improvements in our development priority list and work hard to deliver these at the first available opportunity. Major requested developments are published as evaluations.
- Depending on the complexity of the request we create revised designs and agree these with the developers and the requesting client.
Growth
We only grow our service through strategic developments if all of the above are resolved first.
- Strategic developments are determined through studying the market including weekly review of added Insights, reading academic literature, attending relevant conferences, consulting associates and working with clients.
- An annual member satisfaction survey is undertaken through the Foresight Network and overall results made publicly available. Any actions are added to the development priority list.
- The independent Foresight Network Board also offers suggestions for improvement and we regularly ask the Foresight Network members for ideas. These ideas are again added to the development priority list.
- All developments of a significant nature are published as What's New? on the site.
Listening mechanisms
Apart from the above listening mechanisms we employ a number of other techniques to elicit feedback from members:
- Newsletter feedback
- Requests via email for member feedback
- 'Invocatory' for instant response to member questions
Any feedback from these listening mechanisms that cannot be fixed immediately is added to the development priority list for further review.
Content management
We have a formal policy on 'source assurance' that is applied service-wide.
- A quality plan is individually created for each client, agreed with them up-front, and shared with all those involved in the project.
Design Control
We have an established set of Design Control processes and procedures that cover:
- planning
- reliability
- maintainability
- security
- redundant code removal
- standardization
- version control
- design reviews
- document management
- responsibilities
- change records
Resources
Human resources
- We are a virtual business with no one on our payroll. We rely on international volunteers and hiring professional people for client content work that we know and trust. Our large social network means we are always able to cover absences and hence distribute human risk.
The Directors cover for each other and have created systems that allow for their absence.
In the event that our developers were incapacitated we have the means to quickly hire temporary developer resources from the marketplace.
- Assets
We own no fixed assets. We do have back-up workspaces already set-up in the event that the developers workspace became unavailable for use. As a web-based service our volunteers and those engaged in client work use own systems in a distributed work environment to minimize systemic risk.
Assessment
- Self assessment
We self-assess ourselves using our 'Fit for the Future' health check and are working to close key gaps versus world-class practices.
- Audit
Due to the very small number of quality issues ever surfaced in our operating environment we do not currently undertake an independent audit. We currently consider this non-cost effective versus our existing find and fix forever philosophy. As we grow this may become necessary. However, we are continually looking for ways to grow and to simultaneously reduce complexity and systemic risk through further automation and elimination of human error.
How can we improve?
Please help us to improve our quality guide by giving us your ideas through the feedback form below.