Ep. 88: Follow Up On MY QA OFS Experiment

Follow up on my quality assurance OFS experiment. Getting poor work back from my team has been one of the pitfalls of turning tasks 100% over to my OFS. It's frustrating. And when something gets left undone that seems like, so obvious to me, I just. I get so frustrated. And I wasn't sure how to fix this until now. And this has been so good. So about a month ago, I talked on the podcast, I wrote a newsletter about a terrible video that got published by my team. I talked about how it got published, who published it, why it got published, and then about how I set a process in place towards trying to prevent that kind of thing from happening again. And it has changed my life. So I put a quality assurance person in charge of, number one, checking all content before it gets published or before it comes to me, actually.

So a video gets edited, it gets.

Proposed for publishing, the quality assurance person looks at it, content gets written, it gets proposed for publishing, that person looks at it, both of them, before it comes to me, which has been really great because I see that that person is making edits to the content or suggestions to the video. And then when it comes to me, I get all the way down the list, having seen all the edits done. Then I just see the final product, and I get to look at the final product. If there's something wrong there, fine. I'm willing to say something. But us now, it's really, really great. I rarely say something anymore about the problems, so they don't always catch everything, but it's. It's pretty rare. So I want to show you this video of a conversation that we had in basecamp that where my team went back and forth and back and forth before I was ever involved at solving problems that they had because I had quality assurance people.

So we have this task in online jobs in our base camp where we're working on upgrading a user from a monthly subscription to a yearly, if someone wants to upgrade to a yearly subscription. And a month or so ago, I talked about adding a quality assurance person to different parts of the business. It has changed everything. So dang effective. Watch this. So here's the initial task we're talking about, like, how to calculate this. And just talk with my partner and the developer, Dan and the developer, and lots of discussion about how to make this work. And we make it work. And here he says, okay, it's done. And I added the project manager for online jobs and our QA person to the task, and they both said, the buttons aren't working. He posted A video. The buttons aren't working if you're logged into a Pro account. But why the register button? Hey, the developer says, thanks for reviewing this, I'm fixing it. Oh, I fixed it. Then they said what about I clicked on this and this didn't work. Is it supposed to be like this? Hey, you're right. Yeah. Ideally it should be ready redirect to the correct page. The QA person says, oh yeah, all buttons landed to this page. Oh. The manager says, oh, try logging out. Here's all the tests that he ran. The programmer says, hey, yeah, I think that's how it's working. Here's his reply back. QA persons does great job. The whole thing just got done and I didn't have to be involved in it. My social media stuff is going like this. My content creation stuff is going like this where I have someone in charge of saying hey, this isn't right. That's their job and they have authority. And I think adding authority was a really, really big deal towards saying, yeah, I'm going to point out all the problems here and that has just made things run so smoothly without me having.

To be that person. So if you are struggling with getting good work back from your ofs, let.

Me suggest that you put a quality.

Assurance person in the middle and let me make a couple suggestions here. So number one, when you do this person, make sure that they are a detail oriented person. Don't just hire someone random.

Make sure you have someone who is.

Very detail oriented and you don't find someone detail oriented by posting and saying I need someone detail oriented. You have to make sure. And in my one VAOA challenge, I talk all through how I make sure that people are detail oriented. Number two, give that person a title and a responsibility. So give them a title of quality assurance like quality assurance specialist and then make sure that they know it's their job to say things are wrong here, like things don't look right. It's their job to question if things are being done correctly. Even if they think someone else is an expert and maybe they know more than me, I shouldn't question this. They need to question when they see something wrong. That's their job. And giving this title and the authority to question things will really make a difference on how successful that person is with their quality assurance work.