Using the Tools in Your Performance Excellence Toolbox: Part 3 Tools to Find Out What the Customer Wants

This is the third in a series of posts on using specific tools. It covers two basic tools designed to help you determine what your customer’s real requirements are. When I started my quality journey some three decades ago, we were taught the four pillars of TQM were Error Free Work, Measure by the Cost of Quality, On Time Delivery, and Meet the Requirements.

Customers?

Requirements?

Who are customers and why should I care about what they require?

A customer is more than the person who buys your product or service. Anyone who you interact with can be a customer or a supplier. For example; as the executive director of your organization, you prepare an annual report for the board of directors. You are the supplier and the board members are the customers.
Requirements are “… a singular documented physical and functional need that a particular product or process must be able to perform…It is a statement that identifies a necessary attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system for it to have value and utility to a customer, organisation, internal user, or other stakeholder.” (Requirement, 2013)
There are two basic tools to use for determining the customers’ requirements, Voice of the Customer (VOC) and Critical to Quality (CTQ). In addition there is a highly complex tool – the House of Quality (HOQ).

VOC is just what it sounds like; you are getting direct input from your customers. This means you are listening to them and not using anecdotal or second hand information, SWAGs, or your own ideas to identify the project’s requirements.

There are three basic ways to gather VOC.

• Surveys are a popular way to attempt to gather information. Their main value is when used to gather a lot of responses to a few questions. The biggest short coming of a survey is the limiting factors and variables that impact the response rate and value of the responses. In simple terms value is the inverse of the response rate. The more questions you ask on a survey, the fewer responses you get.

Surveys also lack any interactivity between the surveyor and respondents.

• One-on-one interviews gather a good deal of information from one person. They provide interactivity between the interviewer and interviewee. Threads exploring relationships between ideas can be developed.

Conducting one-on-one interviews require a lot of resources to conduct the interview.

• Focus groups are probably the best means to gather VOC. You have a group of employees (stakeholders) that you tap for their thoughts, ideas, experiences, etc. What makes focus groups the most value added format is that they allow interchange of ideas. They stimulate ideas among the participants. This is an example of the whole being larger than the sum of the parts.

To conduct a focus group, you need to have a skilled facilitator. I suggest that the focus group be no larger than 10 people with 7 or 8 being the best number. You should have at least two facilitators. It is very helpful to record the topics explored on a flip chart, whiteboard, etc. so that participants can follow along and refer back to previous topics.

One of the facilitators will serve as the scribe. If you don’t have a scribe, you need to take the notes yourself. This is not a good approach since you are splitting your focus.

Now that you have gathered the VOC, you need to translate VOC to Critical to Quality. This will enable you to determine what it will take to deliver the customers’ requirements.

Determining what is critical to quality provides you with:
 What your customers measure your product or services by
 Links to customer needs from VOC drivers and specific measurable characteristics
 Processes to transform general data to specific data
 Measurable results

You do it by using a CTQ Tree. The tree consists of three steps, Need, Drivers, and CTQs. An often used example is the need to improve customer service (figure 1).

© Mind Tools Ltd, 1996-2013.
Figure 1 CTQ Tree for improving customer service
You are dealing with needs not wants. Looking at the example:
• The Need is good customer service. This is a general need not a specific need. Throughout the process you are driving from generalities to specifics. They move from being hard to measure (need) to measurable results (CTQs).
• To establish the Drivers ask “what would that mean” or “what would that look like.” You do this until it is not worth drilling down any further.
• When you have drilled down far enough, these are your CTQs.
To give you a better idea of how the drivers can be multi-level see figure 2.

Figure 2 Multi-level drivers CTQ Tree
Figure 3 is an example of a basic House of Quality template. This tool requires a good deal of experience to use it properly. This can include benchmarking comparisons with other companies to help understand your position along with several other aspects to assist decision making.

Figure 3 House of Quality

Implementing Process Excellence: Achieving a Sea Change in Culture

You have determined that your SMB or non-profit organization is ready for the sea change in its culture that performance excellence can require.

The key to successfully transforming your non-profit into a performance excellence organization is that management – which includes middle management through the Board of Directors – must buy-in and support it with actions and resources and not just lip service.

Management cannot wave a magic wand and declare the organization to now have a performance excellence culture.  They must demonstrate their commitment to the changes that are coming by walking the talk.  If the organization has a history of management repeatedly “implementing” the latest business management fad (management by objective, management by walking around, Baldrige Award, etc.), they may well react with “Oh no here we go again, another flavor of the month.”  Everyone in the organization must understand that this is a process that takes a long time to complete, that management is aware of this and that they are going to stay the course.

Leading by example is the one of the best ways for management to show the organization that they are serious about change.  In 1983 Corning Incorporated (then Corning Glass Works) introduced Total Quality Management.  To train the employees, they created a Quality University that every employee had to attend.  To demonstrate their commitment to TQM, the first employees to go through the university were the CEO, Vice Chairman, CFO and the three presidents.  30 years later, Corning’s management still openly demonstrates its support for performance excellence.

Even with management’s support, you must have the support of the employees also.  They must be enabled and empowered to change the culture.  They need to have the resources necessary to be able to actually transform the culture.  These resources include training, tools and the environment that will provide employees with the ability to transfer management’s intent into real results.   Training and tools are something that management can buy and provide to the employees.  But the environment for successfully utilizing these resources must be created internally by management.  If you invest the resources of time and money into training the employees and then release them into the same old work environment, you will have wasted your efforts.

In my experience when it comes to change management, the basic approach to take is change people or change people. If you are confronted with an individual who just rejects the changes, you have to either change their attitude towards the new ways or replace them (let them go).  Neither of these is simple to accomplish.  Be prepared to have the necessary processes and resources in place to handle the situation when it comes up and it will come up.