Often I hear hard-working people – especially those that are really busy – claim that they have completed something, whereas the customer retorts that is not the case. See it like baking this wonderful cake (which indeed has been baked) but failing to bring it to the customer’s birthday party. The only way to guarantee that there is no mis-alignment is like every delivery service does: have the customer sign for acceptance. Below a way of organizing that this acceptance is organized in an ultimately simple manner whereby unnecessary surprises are avoided where possible.

When setting up a new service or facility the following acceptance tests are then required (the resemblance to the OSI-layers is purely coincidental of course):

1. Facilities’ acceptance

Do we have enough square meters office space, workstations/desks, chairs etc.?

2. Hardware acceptance

Same for computers, monitors, keyboards, mice, telephones, headsets per physical   workstation or laptop.

3. Software acceptance

Can we get to the appropriate application log-in pages at each workstation? Any        communication links would also fall in this category: do we have access to this            application that is running on somebody else’s server? And are the latencies            acceptable?

An interesting one here is that certain additional applications might have to be   installed on certain workstations, where either a specialized team will work, or management tools need to be accessible for the management layer. (Or the one computer outside of the company network on a simple outside telephone line for exceptional uses)

4. Configuration acceptance

Does every team member have a log-in to each application she needs and does that userid have the appropriate authorizations? Special point of emphasis is the additional authorizations that might be needed for the management layer. For practical purposes sometimes this test is divided into 2 phases, one for training, where general userid’s are used and individual userid’s when we go live.

5. Application acceptance

Does the Application pass the User Acceptance Test for each use case? Or: have all use cases been identified and walked through successfully?

6. Training acceptance

Did each employees pass their certification test before we let them ‘loose’ on our customers?

All of these acceptance tests can most easily be put in the form of a simple table, with vertically the workstations/employees/use cases that need to be tested and horizontally each hardware component or application. The resulting table can easily be turned into a Yes/No table (although userid’s are very handy next to user names). If there is a breakdown, users can identify easily where the breakdown shows, to help the arriving Facilities/IT/Training support troops to identify where they should focus their efforts.