At the end of the day, every investment decision made by the CFO needs to create economic value for the organization. That’s why selling a Quality Assurance (QA) transformation initiative requires speaking the language of finance and building a compelling business case. Too often, QA is seen as a cost center instead of a value-creating function. But Celtic’s Quality Management Office (QMO) offering helps reframe QA as an organizational imperative that mitigates risks and accelerates profitable growth.
The Last Mile is the Hardest! Every executive understands the importance of quality – no one wants to deliver poor user experiences that damage the brand and customer relationships. But, winning approval for QA investments is challenging because the costs are clear while the benefits are often intangible.
The CFO needs to be convinced that the expected returns will outweigh the upfront costs and extend beyond just cost avoidance.
Celtic helps organizations quantify the tangible financial impacts of poor quality, including:
- Revenue leakage from defects that create friction in buying experiences
- Opportunity costs from delayed product launches
- Rework costs from having to fix bugs post-deployment
- Reputational damage that impairs customer acquisition and retention
The cost of the status quo is simply too high for any company operating in today’s experience economy. CFOs need solutions that don’t just cut QA costs but optimize quality assurance as a strategic capability.
In addition to the clear financial upside, the QMO helps mitigate execution risks in a few key ways:
- Centralized governance ensures QA best practices are promulgated across teams, vendors, and products. Decentralized QA leads to costly rework.
- Independent verification and validation (IV&V) from an objective third party like Celtic produces higher quality outcomes than self-testing.
- Comprehensive test management eliminates blind spots and human errors that allow defects to escape into production.
- Automated regression suites accelerate testing velocity for Agile+DevOps without sacrificing coverage.
By quantifying these risk mitigation benefits, Celtic builds a compelling business case for the QMO rooted in hard economics rather than subjective quality pledges.
Reallocating, Not Increasing, Spend!
For most companies, QA testing is already happening in some form – whether through offshore vendors, system integrator partners, internal developers checking their own work, or bypassing testing to ship faster. The QMO isn’t an extra cost layer, but rather a reallocation of existing spend towards higher-value QA capabilities.
Celtic’s benchmarking data quantifies the significant cost savings unlocked by consolidating fragmented QA activities into a centralized practice. Customers realize operating efficiencies by decommissioning redundant QA tools, eliminating rework from misaligned processes, and redeploying resources from manual testing to more impactful activities.
In essence, the QMO investment realigns finite budget towards QA best practices proven to maximize quality assurance’s ROI. For the financially judicious CFO, it’s a calculated re-spending rather than a speculative new expense.
The CFO’s Biggest Return: Enabling Strategy while mitigating risks and reducing QA costs attract the CFO’s interest, the biggest win is how the QMO accelerates execution of strategic initiatives that drive growth. By instilling quality processes tuned for Agile+DevOps, the QMO compresses product development cycles. Automated testing and defect prevention enable continuous delivery of innovative experiences. Independent IV&V ensures new offerings meet customers’ exacting standards prior to release.
Ultimately, the CFO funds the QMO because it’s a force-multiplier for the investments in digital transformation, D2C business models, workplace modernization, and other strategic growth drivers. Poor quality is a tax that strangles those initiatives – the QMO is the solution to eliminate that tax and unshackle the company’s ability to deliver.
In today’s experience economy, quality is a fundamental expectation that customers won’t compromise on. With Celtic’s QMO, organizations can finally speak the CFO’s language of economic value creation, risk mitigation, and strategy enablement to secure funding for industrial-strength quality assurance capabilities.
The cost of not delivering quality user experiences is simply too great to accept any longer.
