28 Jun You Want What: Part 5-Final?

This is the fifth and final installment of a series that will help you articulate what you want when you order IV&V Services.

To help organizations ask for the services they want The IV&V Group® has developed a taxonomy of IV&V services. It contains only five categoeries of IV&V Services. These include: management and support; engineering documentation; test documentation and test witnessing; reviews and audits; and processes and procedures. Within each category we then list specific services which facilitates the acquiring agency articulating their needs and the supplier meeting those needs. This is a win-win for both.

These categories and their contents provide an orderly core set of IV&V services.

We began with management and support which was followed by postings describing engineering documentation, test documentation,test witnessing and review and audits. This post describes the assessment of process and procedures which contains verification of critical process and their related procedures.  The most typical critical processes include:

• Configuration Management
• Risk
• Test
• Quality Assurance
• System/Software Development

For each process assessed the governing documents are reviewed against the applicable standards.  In addition, the process manager and relevant users of the process are interviewed to identify gaps between “what should be” and “what is.”  As in the accomplishment of all tasks we provide a detailed report to our client-partner.

These processes may be assessed at any time during the product life cycle or they may be assessed throughout the product life cycle.  The frequency of assessment varies with the criticality of the product and the needs of the client-partner.