Left Side of the A3 or the Planning Process

We will spend this section on the left side of the A3 or the planning process. Description of the Components of the A3 Team: The team selection is very important in developing A3s. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of collaboration and building a team. You should go to great lengths to find people who Read More …

A3s Can Vary as Long as Your Storyline Stays Intact

A3s are a formal process to document and report solutions in a storyboard fashion on a single sheet of paper. It actually takes a big piece of paper, 11 x 17, or two 8 1/2 x 11 sheets. The paper is laid out with the left side defining the problem and the right side proposing Read More …

Applying A Systematic Approach To Any Field Is Challenging

A3s are an excellent way to communicate with your team members and other members of the organization. How many times have you picked up a piece of paper and spent much of your time figuring out how the information was organized? Once you did this, you then spent the rest of your time connecting the Read More …

What Customer Centric Really Means

Do you meet the criteria that successful customer-centric companies set? In this podcast, we explore this term and find out what it really means to be Customer Centric.  Author Bob Thompson, an international authority on customer-centric business management who has researched and shaped leading industry trends since 1998. Bob is founder and CEO of CustomerThink Read More …

Focus On The More Formal Deliverables

What would Dr. Deming Say? Dr. W. Edwards Deming advised us that a supplier is a partner and our relationships must be based on cooperation and trust. Adversarial relationships result in waste. Supplier relationships based on Dr. Deming’s teachings change fundamentally and, even better, both suppliers and customers win. Dr. Deming showed how customers and Read More …

Standardize & Leave People Be Creative

There seems to be as many maps in the Service Design world as there is time in the Lean world. Service Design has a few types of maps that they consider, Process Maps, Journey Maps, Blueprint Maps, Net-map, Offering Maps, Mind Maps, etc. Not that I don’t enjoy the tools but it gets rather confusing. Read More …