My whole foray into quality assurance was a side quest that became a main quest. I started at my current place of work with the notion that I was a medical doctor and would be doing doctor adjacent things - not clinical practice, but something within the realm of the seven or so years of experience I’d gathered.
As it goes with smaller companies, you end up falling in where you’re needed. For me that was quality assurance.
Let’s start with what that even means, because most of us perceive QA as a ‘checker-of-things’ - someone who tells people where they make mistakes. A glorified class captain. The reality in my context was compliance, building and maintaining a quality management system, and audit lead all rolled into one. It’s an endlessly extending role if you allow it to be, and daunting to navigate for a first-timer.
I’m going to lean into the quality system and audit piece. As a QA lead you are constantly - and I mean every waking moment - thinking about things being done a certain, defined way.
That’s quality in a nutshell. Figure out how to do things in a way that delivers good results, write it down, then get everyone to buy into the good way of doing things. It’s genuinely as simple as that. All the theatre big corporates add to it is not really necessary.
Once things are written down, you want your company to follow the recipe. One, because it produces consistent results. Two, because it shows outsiders you have your ducks in a row.
Now there’s this thing called auditing. The convention is taking the ‘written-down-things’ a company says it does and checking whether it does them that way. It means going through whatever records they have and seeing whether everyone is YOLO-ing or actually sticking to the plan.
The uncomfortable bit is that the process produces findings - instances where people are not following the written recipe. And these get raised in some formal context. A closing meeting, a report.
Now this is the crux. Findings are neither good nor bad. I know the whole audit paradigm is built around the notion that not having findings is good and they should be avoided at all costs. But that leads to sketchy behaviour which is possibly worse than the finding itself - the record that gets completed the night before, or the register that looks immaculate because nobody has opened it in a year.
You rate severity, because some things are serious and saying so is part of the job. What is not part of the job is judging the person or berating them for it. You report it. A finding is a finding. It’s when you become obnoxious about a finding that the whole thing derails.
So rather than moralise findings as good or bad, treat them as things that are there. The same way you’d spot an interesting tree or patch of grass next to the road. Moralising what you find as an auditor is the fastest way to breed resentment.
Medicine worked this out a long time ago. Morbidity and mortality meetings exist so that the things which went wrong get put on a table and looked at by everyone, without anyone being put on trial. Not because the profession is soft on error. Because the alternative is that nobody mentions the error at all, and then it happens again.
The alternative version of this? The QA person who keeps their distance from everyone, arrives for the audit, works through the records, and delivers the findings at the closing meeting like a judgement of guilt. Technically doing the job, yes, but certainly not fostering an environment where growth happens.
There’s no way a QA human in a company can function without the trust and support of their colleagues. Nothing actually gets fixed unless people are ok sharing slip ups with you. You need to do the work of being involved - not operationally, but being present.
Sit amongst your colleagues, in their meetings and their brainstorm sessions, and get a sense of whether the recipe book is something people can follow or is introducing unacceptable friction into their day.
The biggest tragedy to befall QA is that internal auditors have conflated separation of interests with being isolated. You don’t have to and should not exist in your own silo simply because you need to audit your company. That isolation is why you never get a proper read on what people are actually struggling with, and why everything you say lands like a threat.
So I’m not saying make friends with everyone. What I am saying is do the work of being involved with your company, its people, and what hurdles they face day to day.