I asked Ken Rolfes a few questions about Lean 3P in a podcast, Rolfes on Lean, and we ended up discussing the Customer’s Job to be Done. Ken can be found at KDR Associates.
An Excerpt from the Podcast:
Joe Dager: Clayton Christensen used the words “jobs to done”. You got to look at what jobs need to be done for the customer and how your product or service plays a role in getting that job done.
Ken Rolfes: Exactly. 3M was notorious, and I hope they still are for this in that they used to say, ‘We don’t go ask the customer what he wants we go look and walk in his shoes and see the job he’s trying to get done. And that’s how we create our solutions.’
Joe Dager: I think it’s interesting that you bring that up Ken because so many times when we look at a value stream, or we look at some process flow thing the customer is all the way over there on the right side where you’ve run out of paper. He really should be over in the center of the paper shouldn’t he?
Ken Rolfes: We’ve gotten tool happy if you will in this and I think that’s part of the problem. We’re always in search or another tool if you will. For a while, we were doing Kaizen events and that sort of thing, and then we decided that maybe we ought to map the process and do some value stream mapping. Easy ways to do this stuff by saying well okay what’s the value?
When we’re doing the fulfillment side, you’ve got a lot of things that are defined. When you’re out there trying to develop a customer and develop some business, it’s not nearly as defined. It’s much more complex, and it’s harder to do. It’s harder to define the value, and you can’t do it in a conference room you’ve got to go out there to the customer.
That’s why what you see on the map is all the way on the right-hand side. They probably spend 2% of the time talking about that and the rest of the time wanting to put post-it notes up for the process. I think you got to talk, do a lot more time around that customer value.
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