Following an invigorating and enthusiastic launch of the CEDCE project, it was now time to knuckle down and start this serious work. And one of the most important initial tasks, the development of the quality assurance manual, fell to us at ATU Sligo.
It’s a challenge in a way, to write an interesting blog about quality assurance. I can hear your eyes rolling as you read this! Quality assurance is a necessary evil for the project, and in many ways has nothing to do with the core subject which is data centre engineering. Whenever anyone mentions quality assurance, we all think of someone with a clipboard and a Biro, asking awkward and interminable questions. Well, I am that man!
But quality assurance is crucial to achieving great results for this project. And quality assurance, if it’s done well, should be seen as a seamless element, and a useful facilitator to achieving one’s goals.
Once procedures are developed and agreed amongst partners, it’s important then to manage inputs and outputs from all of the participants. Arguably, this is the hardest part of running the quality assurance on a project with multiple partners from different disciplines in education and also from industry: how to get people to buy into the quality assurance process and not see it as a chore, but rather as a tool for their benefit.
I suppose the most important thing is to hide the clipboard!
At this stage, we are close to finalising the quality assurance manual for the project. It’s been fun and interesting collaborating with the different Work Package leaders. We’ve been working on the methods with which they will assess their work as they go forward, deciding on the forms of assessment that best suits the tasks they’ve been allocated.
For me it’s been like a deep dive into the project and what it will develop over the coming four years.
Alongside the pan-European curricula for data centre training, there are summer schools, visiting lectures, student exchange among other things.
Let me give the last word to a very well-known European:
“Quality is not an act, it’s a habit” – Aristotle