QUALITY OF OUR ANALYTICAL PRODUCTS
Last year, the ABS expanded the resources it invests in analysis. One of the aims of the program is to develop new statistical products that have substantial "analytical content". A key issue is whether the prototype products that we develop are of high enough quality to serve users' needs and to become part of the ABS's ongoing product mix.
Our project teams are accumulating experience in defining, monitoring and assuring the quality of particular products (such as the new output measures for government, socioeconomic indexes, the tourism satellite account and estimates of household wealth). The time is ripe to distil that experience into a quality assurance (QA) tool kit that can be shared by all ABS staff who are developing analytical products and other elaborately transformed statistics.
In the next few months, we plan to define the quality dimensions most relevant to analytical products; this will draw heavily on John Zarb's project Quality Measures for Systems of Economic Accounts. Then we shall walk through a dozen or so analysis projects (past and present) to compile a suite of quality indicators. Then we shall develop a set of quality assurance guidelines; these will supplement the quality management module of the ABS Project Management Framework.
We hope that the tool kit will help analysis project teams address the following questions:
- What quality characteristics of the product we are developing will be most important to potential users?
- What practices will help us assure quality during product development?
- How shall we assess the quality of the product at the completion of our project?
- How can we make the quality characteristics of the product visible to users when we hand it over to them?
The first edition of the QA tool kit will be available by November 2001.
For more information, please contact Ken Tallis : (02) 6252 7290.
E-mail: ken.tallis@abs.gov.au
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