Developing a Quality Assurance Tool for Mission Critical Facilities

Protecting critical assets, people, and information in defense agency operation centers requires teams to respond, respond correctly, and respond quickly to situations that arise on a 24/7 basis. It is important to measure success while also reducing risks that can jeopardize the mission, to consistently improve the processes that directly influence specific objectives. Scalable and affordable decision-support tools are not always readily available for large, mission-critical organizations. These off-the-shelf solutions that define and measure success and reveal areas for improvement are often not attainable due to budget and resource constraints. Additionally, many organizations rely on anecdotal evidence rather than real response data to make critical decisions. To address this, the Quality Assurance and Assessment tool (QAAT) was developed to allow team leaders to review their team's operational response performance. The QAAT is designed to not only understand the confidence level of a team or individual's performance, but it can also provoke change through optimized training procedures and key performance indicators. Working with the resources on hand, the tool was built with two main components: an operational performance review and an analytic data breakdown of performance results. Ultimately, this quality assurance solution will allow organizations to define and measure their success, identify risk factors that may influence their standard operations, and motivate organizational change from the ground up.