Swimming against the tide: progress in QA, one step at a time
Some weeks in QA feel like swimming upstream. The paperwork grows, the audit clock ticks, and every improvement idea seems to require a full rewrite, a steering committee, and a spare fortnight that never appears. In those moments, I come back to a simple lens on progress: get 1% better today.
James Clear popularised the maths. Improve by 1% each day for a year and the gains compound to roughly 37 times better by the end. The point is not the exact number. It is the permission it gives. You do not need a grand transformation to move things forward. You need one small, deliberate step you can take now.
I had a great reminder of this while reviewing a CSV SOP recently. Nothing in it was wrong. It had simply aged. The flow was clunky. Some steps reflected a world before cloud deployments and frequent releases. There were three or four places where small wins were hiding in plain sight. The team’s view, held for months, was that the procedure needed a complete bottom-up rewrite. Everyone agreed. Everyone was also under water. So the rewrite lived on the to-do list with a polite “later” stamped on it.
Here is how I approached it.
Start with one friction point
Under real time pressure, I picked one point of friction that met three tests. It mattered for risk and effort. It was visible enough to be noticed by users. And it could be altered without ripping up the rest of the procedure.
The candidate was hiding in change control. The SOP required a full validation impact assessment template to be completed for any “configuration adjustment”, even when the adjustment was clearly low risk and previously assessed as such. In practice, teams were cutting and pasting the same language to justify the same conclusion. It wasted time. It trained people to treat the template as a hoop rather than a decision aid.
I did not try to fix change control for every scenario. I suggested a single tweak. Add a one-page “low-risk adjustment” pathway with three questions, a risk checkbox, and a pointer to pre-approved examples. If the answers were clean, the change moved via a shortened route with lightweight evidence. If not, it flowed into the existing impact assessment.
That edit did not revolutionise the SOP. It nudged it. Yet within two weeks the team saw fewer copy-paste assessments and faster cycle times for minor items, with no drop in control.
Keep the small change honest
It is tempting for a small change to morph into a medium one mid-flight. This is where tiny discipline pays off. I wrote down, in one sentence, the precise improvement and the limit. “Introduce a documented low-risk pathway for configuration adjustments that match our pre-defined criteria. Scope excludes medium and high-risk changes”. That clarity prevented scope creep and a Friday afternoon of re-debating the whole process.
I also did a quick failure pre-mortem. If this tweak failed in six months, what would have gone wrong. Three risks surfaced. People might overuse the shortcut. The criteria might be too vague. Auditors might perceive it as a loophole. Those risks shaped the guardrails. The pathway used explicit triggers, examples, and a monthly spot-check. A short note explained the intent and where it sat in the wider control strategy. No drama. Just prudent framing.
Make progress visible
Tiny improvements feel disposable unless you make them visible. I agreed two simple measures with the team: the percentage of low-risk changes using the pathway and the median time from request to closure. They plotted both on a single line chart. When the conversation drifted to “we need the full rewrite”, the chart brought people back to the momentum already in play. It also created a record the auditor could follow. Intent. Control. Evidence.
Why this works beyond CSV
You can swap the example. Sponsor communication plans. Deviation triage. Data review meetings that start strong and perish under slide fatigue. In each case, there is usually a small, legitimate tweak available now that makes people’s lives easier and improves control. A pre-meet to agree the single question the meeting will answer. A one-page sponsor explainer that sets expectations at kick-off. A rule that any slide without a point in the headline does not make it into the deck.
None of this needs perfect conditions. What it does need is the decision to start small and keep going. The identity shift is subtle but powerful. You move from “we are stuck until the big rewrite” to “we improve as we work.” Teams notice. Confidence grows. And, yes, you are often in a better position to do that bigger rewrite later because you have taken noise out of the system and built evidence for what actually helps.
A note on judgement and pride
A 1% change is not an excuse for sloppy thinking. It still calls for judgement. The tweak should reduce risk or effort, ideally both. It should be easy to explain and cheap to reverse. It should be safe to audit. This is not about cutting corners. It is about cutting friction that adds no value.
It is also not about lowering your standards. On the contrary, it shows pride in the craft. You honour the system by making it work better for the people who use it, step by small step.
One small step you can take this week
Pick one process you touch daily. Write down a single friction point that meets the three tests: meaningful, visible, tweakable. Propose a one-sentence change and two guardrails that keep it honest. Agree one simple measure to watch for a month. Then ship it.
If you want a prompt for your notebook:
One friction point worth fixing now is…
The one-sentence change is…
Two guardrails are…
The measure we will track is…
Across a year, enough small votes for “we improve as we work” become culture. The tide does not change overnight. It changes because a team learns to swim with purpose, one stroke at a time.
