Entry criteria are the criteria or requirements, which must be met before initiating a specific task or a process. It is a predefined set of conditions that must exist before a unit of project work can commence. It is used as a process control mechanism, to determine the cost-effectiveness of initiating a process or sub process.
Entry Criteria should be used as a preventive tool in the process. It should analysis and prevents the entry of any input that is trivia and adds no value to the process, such as poor quality specifications tools or inadequate levels of prior work.
Exit criteria are the criteria or requirements, which must be met before completing a specific task or a process. It is a predefined set of conditions that must exist before a unit of project work can be deemed, completed. It is used as a process control mechanism to verify that a process or sub process has been completed and that its products are of acceptable quality.
Exit Criteria is also used as a preventive tool during the completion of the process. It analysis and prevents the delivery of any output, which will yield to be an unsuccessful process.
Both entry and exit criteria can be used in any field of business or science, such as software development and business process engineering. A team can set overall quality objectives and manage both entry and exit criteria. Usually these objectives are defined at the project level and implemented in individual processes/stages, where you can track whether or not each objective has been achieved before moving to next process/stage, both during initiation and completion of the process.
Successful measures for Entry and Exit Criteria
- Before the organization commences any process, it should define explicit entry and exit criteria for each process
- Measures or preconditions can be qualitative or quantitative
- Failure to meet entry or exit criteria requires corrective action or restart of whole process with necessary changes
- Moderator should have spot checks to make sure all the preconditions have been met and to avoid any defects or eliminate tasks that are dragging the process timelines
- Update every time a process is initiated or on its completion
- Moderator have to continuously prepare, review and follow-up on the process with an inspective eye
Terms Entry and Exit-criteria is often used in research and development but it could be applied to any field. Benefits are, it assures that the process complies with specific entry and exit criteria before the process can be taken to the next level and similarly up till the last level and before completion.
For instance in telecommunications, lets take a new software or hardware ready for its release. Before giving a green signal for software/ hardware project, certain set of tests is done to check if the product is viable and/or feasible to proceed. If not, they might have to rework on the product. This is entry-testing phase of the program. Another set of test specification is created at the end, to test this new product to ensure that it meets minimum acceptable operational specifications. This test specification will state that the minimum criteria necessary for the testing process to be considered complete and the product is ready for release, which is the exit -testing phase of the program.