Project Management 101 QA Lead to Manager – An overview.

This post is in response to a query by my reader Pratt who wants to know how the role of a person changes when he transitions from a QA lead to a manager in a team and what are the duties discharged by a manager in a QA team.

Delving into the soft skills needed would be too vast a subject to deal with in a blog post  but the bottom line to be mentioned is contrary to popular beliefs, it is not everyone’s cup of tea. Knowing if you ‘fit the bill’ is the primary thing to do since that would decide whether you end up becoming a successful leader or an organizational overhead.

From a Project delivery standpoint, below are some of the key roles played by a QA manager. These are just high level overviews to act as guides and not detailed specs.

Project Management 101 – What works and Whats PMP.

Transitioning from a lead to a manager

A QA manager would have to carry forward all the capabilities of a lead to function successfully. He is responsible for building, growing and maintaining his team. From a project delivery perspective a manager has to be deeply involved in ascertaining the test strategy, timelines and effort estimations. This mandates that he has to be adept at knowing the product or project specifics to the most minute detail, he has to have a strong understanding of all tools and platforms being used or proposed. ( This is often hard to do and hence overlooked by most people nevertheless its critical to project planning and success).  He has to ensure that proper due diligence is done when it comes to risk management and ensure that he has built in necessary contingency plans and not just still to theoretical mitigation statements that exist only on paper but never work.  Every project plan should accommodate cross skilling and up-skilling of team members in addition to on-time delivery and quality since these are critical to sustaining a team.

During the execution phase of a project, the manager has to decide the composition of his project dashboard which simply means the set of metrics he will monitor to measure the health of his project as well as the performance of his team. Choosing the right set of metrics is a highly skilled task since it varies with type, composition and nature of work of project teams and the QA methodologies followed. The notion of organizational metrics for this is a well conceived myth. The QA manager has to ensure that corrective measures are initiated when the effort, deliverables or timelines get skewed beyond the margin of error.

Post execution of the project it falls upon the manager to initiate project post-mortems for all QA activities executed to ensure continuous process improvements from one release to another.

There are many more facets to this but this was just a list to get people started.

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Tags: management, qa lead, qa manager, roles, skill