PROJECT TEAM – How to – Report QC
Purpose of this How To Guide: This How To is a short description of what needs to be considered when performing Quality Control (QC) on a report.
Applicable to: PMs (Project Managers)
Customers: Platinum & Gold full report customers
Timescale: A 10 to 20 minute task that occurs within a day of the report being ready.
Introduction
Full reports (I.e ones with lots of writeups and custom descriptions) need to be quality checked to ensure there are no typos and that it all makes sense!
Have the PDF report open & have the Ninjacat copy open so you can edit the report in tandem.
You can do all the following ‘passes’ at once, but they fall into 3 categories.
Main Checks
The main checks are what you would always consider when proofing any body of work. Read the report slowly and make sure the text of the report makes grammatical sense, has no spelling errors and also refers to the right customer – people make a LOT of writeups and it isn’t completely unheard of for them to accidently write the wrong customer name.
Numbers & Formatting
There are quite a lot of statistics in the report & although you aren’t expected to log into Analytics and check they are right, you should ensure that any statistics referenced in the writeups match the stats in the tables. Since the report takes data from a fixed 1 month window there are sometimes instances where people have looked at a slightly different date range, and therefore reference slightly wrong numbers.
Ninjacat builds the report using HTML for the txt. A Quirk is that it sometimes adds extra <span> tags. These add uneven spacing between paragraphs sometimes. If you find this then the duplicate <span> needs deleting – talk to your line manager to learn more about the HTML used if you encounter this.
Rankings
Ensure that the keyword rankings are reporting on the right keywords for that customer and that the rankings haven’t fluctuated dramatically. If a keyword has gained or dropped a few spaces, then this will be considered by the Account Manager & Lead but if keywords have dropped dramatically (like position 3 to 46) then this might be a deeper problem with the rankings pulled from Topvisor and the Keyword should be manually checked to verify this.
After QC
Once these steps have been followed you can save the Ninjacat copy with any changes you have made and log your time against the QC task in your name. Re run the Report, give it a quick once over to ensure your changes have taken effect and then submit the report to the Account Manager who will then send it to the customer.