The tools are always an important element of any process and Lean Product Development is not lacking in offering its share. Out of what may seem like 100 different tools, I think the most prevalent can be broken down to the following (I have excluded your traditional project management tools):
- Gemba Walks
- Mapping (Which we will cover next week)
- Quality Functional Deployment (QFD)
- Voice of Customer/Voice of Market
- Kano Model
- Pugh Matrix
- FMEA
And of course the ones I introduced in earlier discussions:
- 7 Quality Tools
- Seven Management Tools
- Design Think Tools
Gemba Walks
Way too often we operate in a vacuum and rely on Voice of Customer and Voice of Market Data to govern the services and markets we create. Steve Blank uses the term and encourages entrepreneurs “To get out of the Office” and in Lean Terms, Go to Gemba (Go See). These Gemba walks must be at the place of work where our product or service is being used.
What do you see in a Gemba Walk? It’s interesting because not one of us will see the same thing. As a result, I believe it is important that multiple people observe and document a procedure. We must then all come together and develop a current state of the job that is being done. In “Leanish” terms, the standard work that is being performed. This is the basis for framing the problem that we need to solve.
As Taiichi Ono says, Where there is no standard, there can be no kaizen (improvement). In both an improvement process (PDCA) or a design process (EDCA), we must come to an agreement about the work that needs to be done.
If you need a fresh perspective on how to apply your product or service take a walk. For starters, are you visiting the areas where your service interacts directly with the customer? Are you looking to identify new service delighters and make a lasting positive impression on customers?
Bob Petruska of Sustain Lean Consulting was my guest Business901 podcast, We want People to Go See for Themselves. In the podcast, we discussed his new book, Gemba Walks for Service Excellence: The Step-by-Step Guide for Identifying Service Delighters. The transcription can be read a What do you see in a Gemba Walk. An excerpt from the conversation.
Joe: One of the key things that jumps out at me in your discussion, you talked just briefly about innovation. Innovation really comes from that customer experience, doesn’t it?
Bob: Apple is really interesting as we learn more about it. There is a trial going on currently with Samsung. It’s peeling back the onion giving us new information and new insights on how Apple operates, their innovation process. They’re very team orientated. When you look at innovation in service, you can’t do it in a vacuum, which is the reason why the Gemba Walk can’t be done like the old undercover boss, where the CEO goes in disguise and incognito and tries to go behind the lines and work as an employee.
That’s not a Gemba Walk. Some of the principles are similar, but Gemba Walks are done out in the open. There’s one difference. The CEO is not necessarily involved in it.
We want people to go see for themselves and come up with something new and innovative and learn from someone else, see how that could be applied to their own industry.
For example, if you’re in the healthcare business, and you’re benchmarking another healthcare, you might benchmark the Mayo Clinic or whatever it is, but who’s benchmarking the hotel industry from the healthcare? What could you learn about the customer experience through the eyes of checking in at a hotel?
I think what’s really the key about the Gemba Walk is putting you in the shoes of being the customer, and you end up feeling like you are a customer. Would you enjoy the experience that you’ve created in that service design? That’s just a question for people. What can you do to design your service system to do a better job to delight customers?
Joe: If you’re a healthcare facility, maybe you need to take a Gemba Walk at the Ritz?
Bob: Exactly! If you think about it, they have a check-in a process, right? There’s also a check-in process at the hospital. When you go to the hospital, there’s that insurance. You’ve got to show them the insurance card; how many times is it, nine times or 10? OK, I’m just kind of jabbing them a little. How many times do you have to write down that you don’t smoke cigarettes? By the time you get down to the third floor, you’ve had to tell them you don’t smoke cigarettes 10 times by then. It’s just a question.
There’re so many opportunities to improve that experience. Being on time is another one. How long should it take to get through? How do you manage the customers’ expectations throughout the process? When you’re standing in a big, long line, the last thing, you want to do is think that you’re ignored, and that you have no earthly idea when it’s going to be your turn.
How Disney goes to Gemba to extend marketing for parks? They looked at how being on the ground with your consumer is the tiebreaker when it comes to “making it happen” in the current marketing climate. It’s likely you’re being pushed now to deliver more results in an exceedingly challenging marketplace. If you’re not engaging your audience directly with face-to-face marketing, you may be missing your biggest opportunity. – From Red7 Media on Vimeo.
When we think of all the different types of marketing that we do it is always about how can we make it seem real. The easiest answer to this so many times is simply go to Gemba. I have an old saying that even in this day of high technology seems to becoming more and more true: Business is still done with a handshake.
Wondering what QFD and House of Qaulity are? From ASQ…
Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) is a “method to transform user demands into design quality, to deploy the functions forming quality, and to deploy methods for achieving the design quality into subsystems and component parts, and ultimately to specific elements of the product/service process. Dr. Yoji Akao, who originally developed QFD in Japan in 1966, when the author combined his work in quality assurance and quality control points with function deployment used in value engineering.
Before starting with a QFD, process of understanding what the customer wants, how important these benefits are, and how well different providers of products that address these benefits are perceived to perform. Voice of Customer and Voice of Markets is a prerequisite to QFD because it is impossible to consistently provide products/Services which will attract customers unless you have a very good understanding of what they want.
House of Quality is a diagram, resembling a house, used for defining the relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities. It is a part of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and it utilizes a planning matrix to relate what the customer wants to how a firm (that produces the products) is going to meet those wants. It looks like a House with a “correlation matrix” as its roof, customer wants versus product features as the main part, competitor evaluation as the porch etc. It is based on “the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers’ desires and tastes”. It also is reported to increase cross functional integration within organizations using it, especially between marketing, engineering and manufacturing.