To create great work, you must establish a quality control process. A quality control process will make sure your work meets your client’s standards and expectations. Without a quality control process, your design can suffer and be misunderstood. To ensure the quality of your creative work, adopt our five step quality control process. Please note that this process goes hand in hand with your project plan.
1 – Quality assurance
Before you can begin, your client and Account Manager must decide on the best quality control process. Making this decision is known as quality assurance. According to The ISO 9001 standard for quality management, quality assurance is essential for effective quality control. To assist this decision, your Account Manager must explain the usual steps of your quality control process. After agreeing on a process, they must establish a timeline for your project. This timeline should highlight the dates where your team will require the client’s feedback. It should also flesh out your all-important design process.
2 – Discuss policy, objectives and existing standards
Once your Account Manager has explained your quality control process, they must discuss your client’s quality policy. This policy outlines your client’s standards of quality. Once your Account Manager understands those standards, they must establish a series of quality objectives to meet them.
After establishing quality objectives, you must understand the existing standards of your clients. These are known as brand guidelines. They could include rules about which fonts to use, or how you can adjust your client’s logo.
3 – Review the deliverables and processes of your brief
By now, both you and your client should understand the direction of your project. Now you must translate that direction into key deliverables and processes. These will differ from project to project, but regardless of what you are creating, your deliverables must be clearly defined. These could include the minimum length, file type and audience of your project. Similarly, your processes should adhere to your project’s timeframe. Both your deliverables and processes should be fleshed out in your project plan document. Once these have been reviewed and approved by your team and client, you can begin.
4 – Establish roles and responsibilities for quality control
This is the most important part of your quality control process. It is where you will put your quality control guidelines into action. To save yourself time, you should outline these roles and responsibilities in a flow-chart. These will be different for any team, but ours look a little like this:
1 – Our team reviews the brief, as well as the client’s quality standards.
2 – Based on this review, our team begin developing concepts.
3 – Our designers begin producing content according to the client’s expectations. This process can take on many forms depending on the project. For instance, if it is a video, our designers would start by developing a script.
4 – The Art Director sends each draft back to the designers with comments and insights until they are satisfied with what has been created. At this stage, they must ensure each draft is on brief and aligned with branding.
5 – The Account Manager reviews the work, sending it back to the design team with comments until it aligns with the brief and the client’s expectations.
5 – Examine the quality of your finished product
This step depends on the nature of the project. Is it a presentation for a conference? This means it will have to display well on their projector. Will your design be printed? It will need to adjusted to proper printing dimensions.
Of course, you should align your design to these requirements from the beginning. After all, it would be embarrassing to realise you were designing a piece of print to improper specifications.
6 – Send your work to your client
Once your team is entirely satisfied, you can send your work to your clients. Make it clear that you are seeking feedback, and that you can adjust anything they do not like. Of course, your ability to adjust depends on the stage of feedback. When you receive your client’s feedback, feed it back into step three of your quality control process. Repeat this until all parties are satisfied.
By designing your work in PowerPoint, your client can easily edit your work themselves. This is PowerPoint’s major advantage over other design programs. We understand this, which is why we design all of our work in PowerPoint. To access our expertise on quality control, contact us today.
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