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Framework to manage stakeholders for a Test Manager
M C Nagaraj, Director- Customer Excellence, STAG Software


M C Nagaraj

 

 

 

 

All of us understand the success of an individual depends on his/her contribution to the organization business and how the expectation of stakeholders understood and met by him/her. When a professional choose the Test Engineering as career and decided to grow will always worry about how his/her contribution measured during the journey of their career and how to win the confidence of stakeholders at every stage of their career.

The challenges for Test Manager vary from situation to situation and depend on various opportunities they come across during their career. In this paper I would like to share my experience how I have seen different Test Managers who focused on their contribution to the organization and managed different stakeholders effectively and won the confidence of senior management team to take higher responsibilities. The various scenario shared can be related to the current scenario which some of the audience may be facing in their organization or may face later in their organization. This knowledge will enable them to think how they can see different challenges in managing stakeholders and how to manage them better in different situation. This knowledge will also help the senior management person to measure the value contributed by Test Managers. Few scenarios, which will be discussed:

  • Test Manager to build a strong testing practice in a startup
  • Test Manager reporting to delivery head (who is responsible for managing both development team and testing team)
  • Test Manager who had been assigned the responsibility of consolidating all product testing team into an independent testing organization reporting to senior management
  • Test Manager who moved from a product company to a services company where Test Engineering has its own business goal
  • Many Test Managers in the same organizations

This paper captures the idea how a Test Manager should look at a framework to understand various stakeholders and their expectation. This will also help him/her to add more value to the organization there by growing along with the organization. We all understand a role of a Test Manager in any project. He/she will have standard set of goals as any other project managers normally will have.
Speakers Profile:

Nagaraj is Director- Customer Excellence, in STAG Software Private Ltd. He has over twenty-one years of experience in the software discipline and has worked in all the phases of software development life cycle out of which 14 years in the field of Software Test Engineering.

He is passionate about driving process improvement for achieving better business results. He has delivered lectures on Software Engineering, Software Testing and Software Process Improvement at many organizations and in International Testing Conferences. He was certified internal auditor for ISO and part of internal assessment team for CMM model.

He holds an engineering degree in Mechanical discipline from Mysore University. He has completed diploma in Statistical Quality Control (SQC) from ISI. He is also Certified Software Quality Engineer (CSQE) from ASQ. His interests are in the areas of test design, project management, process improvement, and data analysis using statistical tools.

He had helped many organizations to install a disciplined test process and to improve the process over time. The model used by him in all consulting assignments is Test Maturity Model (TMM). This has helped organizations

  • To commit acceptable goals to their customers and meet with little/no variations
  • To reduce the defect escape rate significantly to their customers production environment
  • To sustain motivated test engineers in the system and show them a challenging career path