Every so often organizations that aren’t happy with their operational performance embark on a process improvement program of the “one-size-fits-all” variety, decide to implement the latest hyped-up development process, or purchase the latest model-based development tool without investigating what their prioritized improvement needs really are. One company that I was helping had for instance planned to ramp up their verification and validation activities as part of a general “quality improvement” effort. When we started talking about their quality and other priorities, we found that both customers and other stakeholders were very happy with the quality of the products but not with the responsiveness to new customer requests. Clearly, in this case, more verification and validation was not what they needed the most.

Improvement
A simple process for finding improvement opportunities.

A good starting point when looking for the most important improvement opportunities is the organization’s set of business goals as stated in a business plan or similar. (When no business plan exists, key people within the company can usually write a good enough business plan in about one hour.) Information that I want to find in a business plan include:

  • What customer segments do we want to target?
  • What value do we deliver to the customers?
  • What value do we deliver to the customers’ customers?
  • With what products and major product features so we deliver that value?
  • What are our tactics to lock out the competitors and lock in the customers?
  • What are our unique selling points? Why buy from us instead of a competitor?
  • Do we have other stakeholders with specific requirements or needs, e.g. authorities or employees?

From this information we can start reasoning about the results that our customers and other stakeholders expect from us and that will make us stand out relative to our competitors; what we need to be really good at producing. Particularly important results are those that support our unique selling points, the product features and our interactions with the customer that make our company different (and hopefully better).

Typical product features that might give us a competitive advantage include aesthetics, availability, ease of buying, functionality, performance, conformance (to standards and regulations) and price. In our interactions with our customers we could excel in e.g. responsiveness, innovativeness, security, accessibility, reliability, competence, credibility, and empathy.

A good example of the ease of buying product feature is Amazon’s one click shopping feature. It eliminates all time-consuming typing and makes it (almost too) easy to buy yet another book or widget. The same company’s success is very much tied to the security of the interactions over the web.

In parallel to identifying customer-oriented results that are important to our success, it is often useful to look at the same issue from an other angle by identifying risks for not reaching the business goals. As a complement to finding out what we need to do right, we here brain-storm what can go wrong. There are various more or less standardized risk analysis methods for finding risks. I will return to these in later posts.

Capabilities
Some capabilities.

Having the desired results and identified risks, we can start to identify what capabilities we need to produce the results and to mitigate the risks. It is also useful to think about what you can do less of (like in the example in the first paragraph of this post).

If for instance aesthetics is a unique selling point, or at least an important product feature, then we probably need to hire a designer or buy a corresponding service that will accomplish exactly that. We may also perhaps add a “look and feel” review in the development process or even a focus group. If conformance to regulatory requirements is crucial or even mandatory, then we need to know those requirements and build them into our work processes.

A number of general capability categories are illustrated in the exhibit to the right. (“Product baseline” refers to the previous version of your product. When developing a new version of a product, the starting point is obviously a very important success factor).

There is no rocket science here of course. But it does pay off to from time to time do the analysis according to the above steps in a structured way. If you are lucky, you may even find that you can actually do less to achieve more.