ID-596-Mike Sonnenschein

Q: I’m currently working in-house for an engineering and IT firm. We do support at NASA and prior to that wasn’t private practice. So, for the past five years I’ve been inundated with some areas that I’ve never considered like redundancy, single point of failure, QA because it’s all tied to the space program. How do you build quality assurance? How do you build that into your policies and procedures? I’ve heard checklists mentioned a few times, do you have any other thoughts on that?
A: There is a lot of thing that you learn like Six Sigma, single point of failure, redundancy and more redundancy that can be the death of a small business. When you launch a spacecraft at Pluto that nine years later has to do things that you need it to do, you’ve got to build up a whole lot of redundancy and robustness into that program because you can’t go change the spacecraft once it’s gone. That’s not true if you’re a small business; you can rip pieces off and put pieces back on all the time. Quality assurance though is making sure that what you deliver meets the promises that you had, that you made to the clients. So, the building of a system involves several pieces. The procedure, this is how we do the system. The templates, these are the templates that you use to create the products that we use in the system. This is the checklist to make sure that you’ve done everything on the template that we use to do the system. This is an example of a well done, completed template form looks like when we do the system. And of course, there’s oversight. If it’s a new person doing the work you have more oversight, later on you spot check but you’re always checking to make sure that the outputs are according to the way you design the system.