NORC understands the importance of effective quality assurance in all project activities and supports this objective with a staff members trained in Quality Assurance (QA). These staff members provide improvement tools, training, and communications that enhance the quality of NORC’s deliverables and services, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of NORC’s processes, and that ultimately support NORC’s corporate mission of providing the highest caliber data in the public interest.
There are seven elements of our quality assurance plan:
The identification and application of quality assurance methods and criteria to support continuous, “real-time” evaluation for specific tasks involved in the data collection process, the development of questionnaire instruments, and software development;
Risk analyses to identify potential vulnerabilities for specific project tasks and to develop mitigation strategies that can be practically applied to increase the likelihood that activities take place as planned;
Strategies to ensure sound project management throughout the project, including processes for facilitating intra- and inter-organization communications, conducting regular management review sessions to examine quality indicators and take any needed corrective action, and managing issues as they arise throughout the project;
Development, training, and use of well-documented procedures for data collection, receipt control, datafile preparation, and delivery;
Establishment of policies and standards that specify appropriate document control, data safeguarding, and records management;
Quality improvement methods to ensure that we continue to monitor and improve all of the key processes used on the project, including a standard improvement model, templates for process documentation, and the use of cause-and-effect analysis charts, checklists, and other tools for improving processes; and
Use of best practices, tools, and approaches we have found to be effective in many other large data collection projects.
NORC also regularly conducts project debriefings and develops retrospective reporting to share lessons learned with other project teams.