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Are you sure you have clear project objectives ?
Unclear objectives? Here is what to think about ...
Have you ever been trapped with an objective defined by your customer which is unclear or impossible to demonstrate achieved ?
This is a common bias that I have sometime observed with colleagues or even with customers that are following unclear objectives.
I remember also two times meeting different customers to help them fixing their internal process and asking them the following two questions :
1. Do you have any performance measurement of your current internal process ?
2. What is the expected performance of your process after we fix it ?
To the first question I had twice the same reply : we do not know how to measure the process performance. We just know that it is not working well and producing the expected outcome.
« Good » I had to say in both cases. « So let’s talk about the second question as the current process is not measured but not satisfactory . What do you expect as an outcome? »
I had again in both cases the same reply : « we do not know ».
So here is the conclusion : If you do not know where you are precisely starting from - It is going to be difficult to know where to go and measure the improvement.
Defining a clear objectif is a must for project execution and success.
Without a clear project charter identifying the following parameters, the project completion will waste time and resources and end-up probably nowhere :
· What is the project definition ?
· What are the team members and their roles into the project ?
· What is the time frame of the different milestones and deliverables ?
· What are the critical success factors ? (also called CTQs – critical to Quality)
· What is the measurable performance of the current process ?
· What the desired measurable outcome of the project ?
· Define a high level process map of what you are trying to improve
Beside this structured approach of a project Definition, it is always necessary to clearly define the objective. This objective should be clearly measurable and project customers should agree of the way to measure success.
This is a must to prevent misunderstanding leading to project failure and frustration.
Let me give you a few examples to illustrate my puropose :
We need to improve the quality of these invoices could be translated by: we need to ensure that
> 99.5% of invoices are mistake free
We need to improve the phone response time could be translated by : we need to ensure in 98% that the Response time is no more than 10 seconds after phone rings for the first time
We need to improve the customer satisfaction to generate fidelity could be translated by : we need to impove the customer satisfaction and ensure that >85% have a satisfaction score above 4 (with a satisfaction rating from 1 to 5).
As you can imagine there is some data crunching behind the scene but in these cases you give your customer (who can be your manager) a clear measurement of the objective success.
Just remember that in many cases your hierarchy or your customer will not define a clear objective to reach but this is up to you to define it and propose it as the target to reach.
There should be an agreement on that objective with your customer in order to ensure consensus on the success of the project.
Feel free to get in touch in you want to get more advices on how to set up the right objective for your project
Customer Survey : How to Start and what to do ?
Ensuring customer loyalty or getting new market shares is never the result of chance but hard work and superior understanding and delivery of customer needs.
Now how to make sure that you undertand what is critical to the customer ? What criteria do they put on top and what are their true expectations ?
The customer survey is a good way to collect their feedback and act to ensure that you improve the products or delivered services.
Where to start ?
Before starting it is important to understand where you want to go.
Do you want to understand the situation as is today ?
What are the areas where you want to collect feedback ?
How do you want to feedback the survey results and take actions against them ?
Are you clear with your expectations ?
Can your customers define clearly their expectations and performance standards ?
…
Designing a customer survey is nothing but simple and can generate if not well prepared a lot of frustrations from the company or their customers.
Therefore it is worth considering its design and analysis as a project.
Let me put in a few words on what to do to start the job :
Definition
1. Define the problem like :
I want to know my customers perception of my services and increase their satisfaction by 25% , or
I want to know my customers satisfaction score with my new products range versus the old range, …
2. Ensure you understand the criteria you want to measure
3. Ask closed questions that require closed answers
4. Define the way you want to capture results ?
Rate answers from 1 to 10 (allways odd number to prevent pure average answers)
Yes, No , Not Applicable
Be mindful of the cultural habits (1 out of 10 is sometimes the maximum or minimum grade depending on culture)
5. Limit the number of questions to the strict necessary
6. Outside of pure product of services questions you should ensure that you can define and sharpen respondant profiles
7. …
You have made a great job designing your customer survey and now you are ready to go … wait one more minute.
Deployement strategy
Now you should define the deployment strategy :
1. Paper type left by your sales or services reps ?
2. On Line survey with a link ?
3. Mass email ?
4. How much time do you consider to collect answers
5. How much answers do you consider sufficient to understand the picture and take actions ?
6. What will be the next steps ?
These questions are critical and you better pause until these get clear answers before starting.
Customers are eventally willing to invest time responding your survey if they perceive that they can get a better product or service afterwards.
So there should be a real upfront Survey marketing plan to ensure success.
Collect the answers
Now it is time to deploy on the field the survey and collect answers …
Do not feel frustrated by the low response rate.
10 to 15 % response rate can sometimes be perceived as a very good response rate. You have to define what is necessary for your study.
What is the appropriate good number of response to ensure viable survey analysis ?
This is much depending on the number of questions asked. The more questions, the more responded survey necessary to perform an actionable analysis
Analyse the answers
Here is another big part of the job. What to do with undereads or thousands of answers , sometimes incomplete or biased . Even dully filled up you may end up with tons of data that you need to analyse and understand.
Without getting into deep there are just a few important considerations :
1. What is the overall data pattern ?
2. Are you managing a normal distribution of data or non-normal distribution ? Not knowing can lead to mistake or biased results
3. Are you able to determine each criteria / question against expected performance ?
4. …
Statistical analysis is a science and ensure that you have the right support to analyse data.
Analysis and feedback
Once you are done with the analysis you should communicate internally to your organisation and eventually take actions to improve areas that need to.
Last but not least you should now give feedback to your customers with the survey results.
Thank them for the time they invested to reply your survey. Be careful to reply each one customer that has expressed frustration if any. This is a great chance given to organizations to connect directly with their customers and give answers to their potential room for improvement.
It is now the time to draft and action plan and determine the date for the follow up survey (same format as before so that results can be compared).
As a conclusion : defining and implementing a customer survey is nothing but simple and can lead to a bad experience if not well managed.
Feel free to get in touch in you want to get more advices on how to set up the right customer survey for your project
Change Accelerating Process
Quality x Acceptance = Effectiveness
Have you already heard about CAP before ?
CAP Stands for Change Acceleration process and is a tremendous toolkit developped by General Electric in the 90’ based on the fact that many very good projects with excellent technical plans where failing due to lack of team change acceptation.
Taking care of people in a project is equaly important as taking care of the technical side of the project.
GE then created the Effectiveness equation as below :
E = Q x A
Where E equals to the Effectiveness of any initiative, Q equals to the Quality of the project and finally A equals to the team acceptance of the project.
As you can see the equation is based on a multiplication, meaning that if there is no acceptation, the result of the project effectiveness will be null.
CAP is a 5 steps methodology that will give a structured path to team change acceptation and leadership.
The principle is to ensure that the team is engaged and there are a few steps and tools to use in order to get tthe team fully engaged.
Step 1 – Creating a shared need
· Why do we do this project ?
· Are the team members all aligned with the need for this project ?
· Are all the team members delivering the same message regarding the need for change
Example of tool to use : Threat vs Opportunity matrix
Step 2 – Shaping a vision
· Has a vision clearly been articulated for the project ?
· Is the vision of the project energizing and motivating ?
· Is the vision shared and understood by all ?
· Is the vision actionable ?
Example of tool to use : Elevator speech worksheet
Step 3 – Mobilizing commitment
· How well has the team identified the participants and potential sources of resistances ?
· Has the team developed win-win strategy to convert key influencers as needed ?
· Has the team developed solutions to build commitment ?
Example of tools to use: Stakeholder analysis for change – Influence strategy – Communication plan
Step 4 – Making the change last
· Has the team correctly estimated the change effort ?
· Has the team correctly evaluated the effort integrated into other business initiatives
· Has the team correctly evaluated the time required to implement the change
· Has the team correctly evaluated the resistance to change ?
· Are the needed resources made available
· …
Example of tools to use: Changes Prioritization Matrix – Integration matrix with other business initiatives – Reward worksheet - …
Step 5 – Monitor progress
· Has the team set milestones that everyone understand and agrees with ?
· Are teams members accountable for result ?
· Has the team stated objectives in concrete terms
· Has the team translated these objectives in concrete measurable behaviors ?
· Are expected results in line with internal and external goals and are them evident to the stakeholders ?
Examples of tools to use : systems and structre analysis – Behavioral change analysis
This looks like a lot of steps and questions to ask yourself but it is not.
Before starting a project where change is required, it is very important to be well prepared and think upfront how to mobilize energies rather than get the project derail due to lack of preparation.
The good way to make it work is to start and things will clarify along the way.
Feel free to get in touch in you want to get more advices on how to set up the right CAP for your project
Many thanks to our customers for their trust in 2023.
We will be happy to continuously supporting your needs in 2024.
21/02/2019
Global Industry - Lyon
JLK Management Consulting will be attending to the Industry 4.0 International days in Lyon by March 6th during the Global Industry fair.
Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, additive manufacturing , big data, IoT, ... and many more new disruptive technologies will be discussed during conferences and roundtables.
JLK Management Consulting is a partner of companies willing to improve their service operations and bring the customer experience to the next level.
Interim management and consulting services are regular offering and we will be happy to meet you in Lyon and discuss your needs.
Get in touch to book a meeting and have a free confidential discussion.
Let's meet in Lyon on March 6th, 2019
06/02/2019
Serious Game - Enterprise Management
JLK Management Consulting participated to the fun and intense event organized by #Procadres International aiming to drop the participants in a similar to real situation when managing the operations for a company facing severe competition and serious challenges .
This team event was perfectly directed by Victor Swensson (#The Hybrid Experience) and allowed 5 teams to compete among themselves and generate profit for their virtual company.
Fun, intense and challenging were the main drivers of this educative and however Serious activity.
30/01/2019
Health Valley / Inartis event
JLK Management Consulting attended the Health Valley - Inartis event at HP Enterprise by Jan 29th, 2019. The topic was all about the digital transformation of Healthcare centers. Patient simulations were organized. Patients flow and data sharing in and out the medical centers were topics of demonstration by specialized companies like : Medisante : Telemedicine - Stanley Healthcare : Patient physical security - PrYv : Patient data security - Artanim : Patient augmented reality
Very nice presentation from Pr Geissbuhler on what is already the Medecine 4.0 where the patient is partner to the health journey.