Risk Management Focused Test Planning

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Despite rocky economic times, businesses continue to make significant investments in contact center and communication solutions. These businesses want to take advantage of the potential cost savings, customer service improvements and business process efficiencies promised by technological enhancements like IP telephony, unified communications and more. There is no doubt it is costly and risky to implement these solutions. One bad customer experience can result in a lost sale or customer; and an improperly developed solution can result in lost process efficiency. It all adds up to decreased return on investment.

Given all the challenges and risks, how can businesses protect their contact center and communication solution investments?

Take a life cycle approach to comprehensive risk analysis and proactive test planning. By establishing a focused risk management program, businesses can reduce and eliminate many of the performance issues that negatively impact service and increase costs. The program should employ planning and testing methodologies that optimize the use of resources to ensure the best-possible customer experience. A life cycle approach to risk analysis and test planning should identify the areas of greatest and lowest risk, throughout the lifecycle, so you can put your testing time and resources where they will deliver the most value.

What is the Solution Life Cycle?

PDIOO is often used to represent the life cycle approach to IT solutions: plan, design, implement, operate and optimize. With the current melding of IT, call center and telecom departments, it is not surprising that many communication solutions providers and teams use a different set of words to represent a similar life cycle approach to their communication solutions.The stages of the life cycle from a communications solution perspective include:

Planning
Development
Deployment
Production
Evolution

What are Contact Center and Communication Solutions?

A contact center or communication solution is the integration of multiple communication technologies and business requirements to facilitate customer interaction. The technologies integrated into a single solution and the business requirements addressed by the solution are diverse and complex.

Businesses should also remember that employees are customers too. Testing employee-facing communication solutions helps businesses successfully plan, design, deploy, maintain and evolve integrated IP telephony solutions that deliver significant cost-savings and empower employees. Robust testing and management tools empower internal IT and telecommunications teams through centralized access to phone configuration information, as-built documentation, change control information, remote phone control and much more.

How to approach comprehensive risk analysis?

Comprehensive risk analysis is the first step toward protecting contact center or communication solution investments. To get started, gather the appropriate resources for a meeting to review solution and business requirements. The outcome of the initial meeting should be a list of the most critical functions along with a list of the areas that might experience the most issues. Their sensitivities, concerns and instincts should have a significant influence on decisions about when and where to focus your testing resources. It is critical that the risk analysis take all sources of concern into account: revenue generation, maintainability, usability, etc. It may be helpful to augment internal expertise with outside resources to facilitate and manage the risk analysis process. An outside consultant brings objectivity, breadth of experience and expanded perspective to the program. By identifying the areas of greatest and lowest risk, your combined team can direct your testing time and resources where they will deliver the most value.

What makes for a good test plan?

The result of the comprehensive risk analysis should be a proactive test plan. In addition to business objectives, performance goals and budget, the test plan should outline specific test-related activities and preliminary acceptance criteria for each stage of testing. The plan should identify and prioritize risks and offer a test approach for mitigating each risk.

For example, your team expresses concerns about a business continuity plan that didn’t work as expected during a recent outage. You identify the risk of an ineffective business continuity plan in your test plan. You further determine that business continuity and disaster recovery load testing will allow you to confirm the business continuity plan and systems will work as expected in an emergency situation. Because of the revenue-impact, your team decides that the acceptance criteria for the testing will be that there can be absolutely no impact on customer experience or service when the business continuity plan is executed.

Each program involves unique elements that should be considered in the plan and validated during testing.Taking the time to develop a risk management-focused test plan and schedule is essential to protecting your investments in contact center and communication solutions.

When to start testing?

Testing in the early stages of a project can identify problems that if discovered too late, add significant time and cost to completing an implementation. The earlier you identify and resolve issues, the better your return. You can better avoid or decrease the risk of postponed or unachieved returns by testing as early in the solution life cycle as possible. However, planning and testing can have a significant and positive impact on ROI even if your solution is already in production or near the end of its life cycle. Regardless of the life cycle stage, businesses have an opportunity to identify and resolve the areas of greatest and lowest risk for their solutions to deliver as much value as possible.

What type of testing will help manage your risks?

Component testing and internal monitoring are important quality-assurance methods. But when it comes to protecting contact center and communication solution investments, nothing is a better indicator of performance than customer experience. Testing the end-to-end performance of the solution from the customer perspective is the most cost-effective way to protect your investment. There are five customer-focused testing methodologies you can use to mitigate risk and optimize return:

Test Planning, guided by focused risk analysis is critical to optimizing the use of testing to help identify and manage risk.
Functional Testing, performed during the development, deployment and evolution stages of the life cycle ensures the application and other components perform as designed .
Performance and Load Testing, performed throughout the life cycle to benchmark, observe, tune and verify solution performance under various conditions including increased levels of activity (via one or multiple channels)
Availability and Performance Monitoring, conducted during production and evolution stages of the life cycle validates the solution’s availability and performance and enables performance optimization efforts
Enterprise Solution Testing, management tools and services focused on ensuring that IPT solutions are fully functioning, properly configured and thoroughly documented throughout the life cycle.

What type of testing at each stage?

It is essential to conduct the right type of testing during the right stage of the life cycle.

Planning: During the planning stage, it may be important for you to establish that the new solution performs as well if not better than an existing solution. In this case, performance and load testing can be performed to provide benchmark data for future comparison.

Development: Testing in the development stage increases the probability of staying on schedule and within budget. Periodic performance and load testing helps developers incrementally debug their work and reduces the number of issues that delay deployment or negatively impact production. Iterative functional testing of application usability and design also helps the developers and implementation team ensure the solution will perform as designed..

Deployment: Testing in the deployment stage gives all the project stakeholders confidence that the solution has met all acceptance criteria and is ready for real customer traffic. Performance and load testing at this stage are critical to ensuring that the solution is going to perform as expected in the integrated production environment. Comprehensive functional testing of the application should also be performed to ensure it performs as designed and to provide final acceptance documentation.

Production: During production, it is critical that you know the solution continues to perform as expected despite daily issues and upkeep routines that might unexpectedly impact customer experience. Around-the-clock availability and performance monitoring, conducted from the customer perspective, is essential so you are notified immediately if the solution stops delivering the expected customer experience. Performance and load testing should be used at this stage to observe, tune and verify solution performance before and after upgrade or trouble-shooting to ensure there is no negative impact.

Evolution: When it comes to optimizing the performance of your solution to keep up with enhanced technologies and ever-changing customer demands, all testing methodologies can deliver valuable information to help you evolve the solution to get the most out of your investments. In addition, proactive monitoring and analytics will provide historical data and trends that point out optimization opportunities.

Protect Your Investments throughout the Solution Life Cycle

Positive customer experience is critical to achieving the ROI expected from technologies and solutions focused on customer and employee communication. Comprehensive risk analysis, test planning and targeted testing throughout the solution life cycle are key to positive customer experiences and optimized returns.