Enhanced Business Acceptance Testing for Large Enterprise

Background

A large public organization needed to standardize and improve their acceptance testing practices. The organization has two distinct sides: business and IT, with complex interconnection. The business side consists of non-technical SMEs who use the solutions released by IT to add value to the marketplace. The IT side provide solutions to the business side that they develop with both vendor and in-house teams, deploy to cloud and deploy to on-premise environments, and practice both waterfall and agile methodologies.

The organization found that inconsistencies across documentation, processes, and team understanding were causing operational friction and inefficiencies. Essentially, too many bugs were making it into production, and it had a great cost to both business teams and IT teams.

The organization wanted help to train their IT teams on an internal Business Acceptance Testing process in the form of a workshop which included guidance on how IT BA leads could train their business-side SMEs on acceptance testing (train the trainer). The organization also wanted help to author acceptance testing modules for their enterprise LMS in-order to support learnings from the live workshop and future team members process knowledge.

My Contribution

I began the project by reviewing the organizations internal documents and meeting with my project sponsor regularly to discuss their process and expectations. I also requested a survey of participants with key questions asking about their pain points with respect to acceptance testing.

Next, I developed and facilitated four interactive, hands-on workshops for over 60 professionals. These workshops emphasized peer-to-peer learning, collaborative exercises, and live critical review sessions. Most notably I included group red-lining exercises of internal process documents. These exercises exposed inconsistencies across teams and sparked productive dialogue around creating a flexible yet practical Business Acceptance Testing framework rather than rigid standards. By adapting my role to facilitator rather than traditional instructor, I encourage experienced participants (many with over 20 years experience) to share their knowledge and enabled peer-to-peer learning.

Lastly, I collaborated with the organization’s instructional designer (ID) to create internal learning resources. Together we authored and tested an eight module course for the organization’s LMS. This course is still in use and supports the organization to ensure capability and consistency in business acceptance testing for the future.

Project Outcome

The workshops improved the organization’s approach to Business Acceptance Testing, providing clarity, consistency, and practical frameworks for execution. Participants deeply valued the collaborative environment, and the adaptive facilitation approach transformed individual expertise into collective organizational knowledge.

Over four cohorts, involving 60+ professionals, these workshops established a robust foundation for ongoing improvements in BAT processes, significantly enhancing operational effectiveness and internal knowledge transfer.