Intergrating methodology with current business processes

Dear Eval TF, 

For many good reasons I considered it valuable to check if there would be an impact for an organisation (especially, those operating 1st party evaluation) if they tried to integrate our new methodology into their current business processes - and, as an aside to find out where this integration might best occur.  

I decided to ask a company who already has a good historical reputation for accessibility - as the impact of something new would be most obvious.   The organisation very kindly gave me time to ask many and varied questions - and below is the brief summary of my quick study.

Summary:

I am pleased to say that from this quick study I found that little, if anything at all, would seemingly stop an organisation currently operating 1st party evaluation from being able to adopt this new methodology. 

That said there is a best practice which I would like to share with you, which could be very useful all round. It is very beneficial for an organisation to start an HTML code library (if they already haven't).  When a new interface component is needed the library is checked - and if it is found not to be present a new component is made and stored in the library.  A controller job role has responsibility for ensuring that new components are built using techniques which support accessibility.  

NB. The techniques the controller uses should be publicly available and listed - which means they can easily be used by the evaluator in the evaluation.  

And, with regard to where to integrate the methodology in the context of organisations currently operating 1st party evaluation…  This methodology (in my opinion) is best suited to integration into User Acceptance Testing (UAT) - be it for internally developed websites, or websites which have been developed through outsourced processes.  A great deal of the inputs required for this methodology are already generated for UAT (user stories, etc…), so its integration here might provide the lowest impact and best cost / benefit.  The only thing would be to state how important Step 4a is when using the evaluation in UAT.

Finally, having read the evaluation methodology again I could not find suggestions for where the methodology could be integrated into current business processes.  From a 3rd party evaluation point of view it is mostly irrelevant, but from a 1st party evaluation view it could be quite useful.  

What would the group think to including a small sub-section (entitled "1st Party Evaluation") under the Considerations for Particular Situations section - drawing information from the later suggestions above?

Very best regards

Alistair

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2013 15:19:46 UTC