Questions Lead – Answers Follow

One of the fundamental mistakes I have seen repeatedly that leads to the loss of expected impact of improvement to a business process is making changes based on individual observations, education, and experience alone. What is missing is asking questions of all the people impacted by a proposed change. The people that operate, support, audit, and reap the benefits of a process, collectively referred to as stakeholders for the purposes of this post, often have valuable knowledge about a process.
Processes are used to complete a task, or multiple tasks, repeatedly in a consistent manner. The nature of the repetition gives the local stakeholders many observations with which to build a mental repository of data about a process. There is one tool (often under-utilized) at everyone’s disposal that allows the harvesting of that valuable data. Asking questions will yield valuable insight about exceptional conditions, frequencies and probabilities of occurrences, pareto of key information, historical perspective, and trends. The information may not appear as reliable as data from a sophisticated electronic data collection device, but undervaluing it will certainly reduce the effectiveness of an “improvement”.

Technorati Tags: Employee Involvement,Business Process Improvement,Bayesian Statistics

Dashboards – Not Just for Cars

The automotive dashboard is designed to quickly communicate important information and status without causing a distraction that could endanger the passengers or community. 

With the demand for increased productivity and the explosion of available information, dashboards are a valuable tool to utilize in the world of business.

A well designed information dashboard that will be used by multiple functional groups (e.g. Sales, Production, Engineering, and Quality) should provide the following:

• Minimal information that communicates status (normal/abnormal, on-time/late, action required, etc.)
• Meaningful information for the people that will be using it
• Simple and easy to read visual indicators like colors or commonly recognized icons preferred over complex charts & graphs or verbose text
• Ability to drill down into more detail, as necessary
• Easy to access or hard to miss. If it is more than a click or two away, it may not be used.
• Easy to update or automated. If the information is not current, it will not be trusted.
• Ability to filter by functional role or responsibility

The dashboard by itself has little value. An information dashboard is simply a tool that is typically used to support a well defined process where the users understand and agree with their roles and responsibilities surrounding the process and use of the dashboard.

Resistance to Change is Avoidable

Background

I just finished revamping my Church’s website replacing the mostly static pages with a content management system to provide additional features and make it easier to maintain and keep the content fresh. Initially I just used one of the included design templates while I was populating the content. The few people that had early access to the site before it went live were complimentary about the design for its clean professional look. As a result, I decided to use the template for the finished site.

The plot thickens…

After the site went live, I added a Poll to see how the members liked the new site. After spending four weekends and several weeknights on the website, I was dismayed to see someone voted “I do not like it at all”.

I announced the sad news to my wife and she commented “I wonder who wouldn’t like it”? Understanding everyone has reasons for their opinions and often people have the same viewpoint, I responded that my teenage daughter was pretty vocal during the development that she did not like it. She was sitting in the living room hearing the entire conversation (with a grin on her face). My wife asked her in jest, “Did you do that?”. To our surprise, she DID. We all had a big laugh about it. She will forever be cursed by having my sense of humor.

The back story

Since 1999, when my daughter was young, she helped me on the church’s website. Whether it was suggesting a graphic or illustration, or a suggestion about the colors I was using, she often provided input that ultimately influenced the design of the website. This time since I used a pre-made template, I didn’t ask for her input. She thought the template was plain and boring (mostly shades of grey with only a little color sprinkled in) so she didn’t like it. With her influence the two previous designs had more color and character, but didn’t necessarily project the image of a church as large as ours, in a medium (web) that is currently dominated by professional graphic design.

The take-away

Any time one is introducing change:

1. involve the people that will be affected by the change in the design and they will have a sense of ownership that will protect making change for the wrong reasons in the future.
2. understanding the reasons for resistance to change will give you valuable insight into why the change might not work as-is without further consideration or development of countermeasures.

Technorati Tags: Resistance to Change,Participation

Experience with Great Product Tainted by Service

OK "Tainted" is too harsh. It was the only food related term that came to mind quickly. I recently celebrated a wedding anniversary. I decided to send an Edible Arrangement to my wife at her place of employment in lieu of flowers. The arrangement was very impressive. I was pleasantly surprised that it was larger than I expected. It was more unique than a bouquet of flowers. The product was great! My wife was 100% satisfied by the experience, which is the most important thing.

As a person that has spent an entire career in executing continuous improvement, there were two clear opportunities for improvement related to the service part of the experience.

The first is easily corrected. When the arrangement was delivered to my wife, it was delivered with a catalog and price list. If a flower shop delivers a bouquet of flowers, I am reasonably sure they don’t deliver marketing material to the recipient. I called Edible Arrangements and suggested that their delivery person should be instructed to leave the marketing materials with the office manager and express that it should not be delivered to the recipient. [update 2/25/2009: the owner called me back and he was the one who delivered the arrangement. He actually did tell the office the arrangement was to be delivered to my wife and the catalog was for the office. The office was responsible for passing on the catalog/price list.]

The second aspect with room for improvement relates to delivery orders only. The website allows you to select the following day for delivery, for which a nominal delivery fee will be charged. However, in several places on the website it expresses that delivery dates are not guaranteed. As a consumer, despite the warnings, we all expect our deliveries to be made on time regardless of the lack of guaranteed delivery. I called the following day to verify that it would be delivered that day. Again I was told that the delivery dates are not guaranteed, but Andrey was confident it would be delivered on time (which it was; it was even delivered according to my special request for a specific time to make sure she was still at work when it was delivered). That exchange made me wonder, how many times per year is the delivery not actually made on the requested date? If it was a small percentage, is it worth making every possible consumer be concerned about the delivery, just to prevent a handful from being thoroughly upset? From a marketing perspective how much is that concern worth? If a few people were upset by a lack of on-time delivery, it would probably put an adequate amount of pressure on driving to root cause the reasons for not meeting the requested date.

Support your local community businesses, and if there is room for improvement, tell them (nicely). It takes a lot of hard work, passion, and dedication to build and maintain a business in this economy. Most of the time, they want the opportunity to Wow us.

Punxsutawney Phil is let go with 6 weeks of severance

This morning in the parking lot on the way into our office complex, I had a short conversation with a local small business owner, Tom (not his real name). I was lamenting about the fact that 8 of the last 9 years (including this year), Phil (the groundhog) saw his shadow and curses us with another 6 weeks of winter. I wasn’t looking forward to a treacherous 30 mile drive to Auburn, Indiana in the winter weather the following morning. Tom commented that Phil should consider that in this economy, he could be replaced.

The underlying wisdom in the brief entertaining water cooler conversation into the building is that it is more important than ever to listen to the voice of the customer (me - wanting an early Spring). Fortunately for Phil, his heritage affords him a permanent position predicting the arrival of spring. The rest of us need to focus on the value our customers recognize in our work.