Tag Archives: Technology Management

The Achilles Heel of Customer Journey Mapping

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Journeying through western Wyoming in August 2011. Image Credit: me.

Achilles was that guy in Greek mythology whose mother, when he was born, wanted to protect him soooo much that she held him by the heel and dipped him in the power-giving waters of the River Styx — making him bullet proof (and much more; no bullets then), except at the heel, because for some reason she didn’t think about just dunking him a few inches deeper. Maybe she didn’t want to get her hand wet? Who knows. (In the research literature this is called perverse unintended consequences — it happens in business too. You try to make an improvement or protect against a particular hazard and oops, you made it worse.)

Customer Journey Maps (CJM)

I’ve been reading a lot about the Customer Journey Maps (CJM) technique used in marketing (see Folstad & Kvale (2018) for a fantastic and comprehensive review). It formalizes the very good suggestion that when you’re trying to figure out how to engage with prospects, you should put yourself in their shoes. Empathize with them. Figure out what they need, and when they need it. Then, identify how your company can not only meet them there — but connect with them in a compelling way.

CJM also goes beyond conceptual modeling. For example, Harbich et al (2017) uses Markov models to predict the most likely path and timing of a customer’s journey. Bernard & Andritsos (2018) mine actual customer journeys from sales force automation systems and use them in a Monte Carlo like way to uncover patterns. There’s even a patent on one method for mining journey data.

Benefits of Journey Maps

Annette Franz says that “done right, maps help companies in many ways, including to…

  • Understand experiences.
  • Design [new] experiences.
  • Implement and activate new experiences.
  • Communicate and share experiences.
  • Align the organization… get executive commitment for the customer experience (CX) strategy, get organizational adoption of the customer-centric focus, provide a line of sight to the customer for employees, and help employees understand how they impact the experience.”

But like Achilles, Customer Journey Mapping has a vulnerable spot that can wipe out all its potential benefits. (Fortunately, success lies in the way your organization wields the tool… so there’s a remedy.)

The Achilles Heel of CJM

Here’s the problem: creating a journey map does indeed ensure that you focus on the customer, but does not ensure that you’re focusing on that customer’s experience. Diagnosing Voice of the Customer (VoC) is hard [long explanation; shorter explanation], and there are tons of ways to do it! Through journey mapping, you may accidentally be focusing on your company’s experience of that customer throughout the stages of the journey. 

Diagnosing the Symptoms

How can you tell? Here’s a non-exhaustive list of ways to diagnose the symptoms, based on recent research and observing companies who do this since about 2009 (please add in the comments if you’ve observed any other ones):

  • Do you ever hear “How can we move the customer from [this stage] to [the next stage]?”
  • … or “How do we get more customers to join us [at this stage of the journey]?”
  • … or maybe “How can we get customers to [take this action] [at this stage of the journey]?”
  • Does your customer journey address differences in customer personas, or do you have a one-size-fits-all map? Rosenbaum et al (2016) says “We contend that most customer journey maps are critically flawed. They assume all customers of a particular organization experience the same organizational touchpoints and view these touchpoints as equally important.”
  • Do you systematically gather, analyze, and interpret data about what your current customers are experiencing, or do you just kind of guess or rely on your “experience”? (Hint: subconscious biases are always in play, and you’ll never know they’re there because they are subconscious).
  • Do you systematically gather, analyze, and interpret data about what your prospects would benefit from experiencing with/through you, or do you just kind of guess or rely on your “experience”?
  • Do you focus on ease of use over utility? (Just like perfect is the enemy of perfectly OK, easy can be the enemy of possible if you’re not careful. This often shows up in the journey mapping process.)

Like I mentioned earlier, this is definitely not a comprehensive list.

The Solution

What’s the solution? ASK. Ask your customer what they need. Find out about their pain points. Ask them what would make it easier for them to do their job. Finally, ask them if you’re getting it right! And even though I said “customer” — I do mean you should ask more than one of them, because needs and interests vary from person to person and industry to industry. Just interacting with one customer isn’t going to cut it.

Ask early, ask often! (As people learn and evolve, their needs change.)

Improving the Method

How can we improve the quality of customer journey mapping? Share your insights and lessons learned! CJM is a promising technique for helping organizations align around empathetic value propositions, but just like agile methods, it’s got to be applied strategically and deliberately… and then checked on a continuous basis to make sure the map is in tune with reality.

There’s a Fly in the Milk (and a Bug in the Software)

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Where “software bugs” got their name — the dead moth stuck in a relay in Harvard’s Mark II in 1947. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug

As one does, I spent a good part of this weekend reading the Annual Report of the Michigan Dairymen’s Association. It provides an interesting glimpse into the processes that have to be managed to source raw materials from suppliers, to produce milk and cream and butter, and to cultivate an engaged and productive workforce.

You might be yelling at your screen right now. DairyMEN’s? Aren’t we beyond that now? What’s wrong with them? The answer is: nothing. This is an annual report from 1915. Your next question is probably what could the dairymen be doing in 1915 that would possibly be interesting for production and operations managers in 2019?  The answer here, surprisingly, is a lot. Except for the overly formal and old-timey word choices, the challenges and concerns encountered in the dairy industry are remarkably consistent over time.

It turns out that flies were a particular concern in 1915 — and they remain a huge threat to quality and safety in food and beverage production today:

  • “…an endless war should be waged against the fly.”
  • “[avoid] the undue exposure of the milk cooler to dust and flies.”
  • “The same cows that freshen in July and August will give more milk in December it seems to me… because at that time of year the dairyman has flies to contend with…”
  • “Flies are known to be great carriers of bacteria, and coming from these feeding places to the creamery may carry thousands of undesirable bacteria direct to the milk-cans or vats.”

In a December 2018 column in Food Safety Tech, Chelle Hartzer describes not one but three (!!!) different types of flies that can wreak havoc in a food production facility. There are house flies that deposit pathogens and contaminants on every surface they land, moth flies that grow in the film inside drains until they start flying too, and fruit flies that can directly contaminate food. All flies need food, making your food or beverage processing facility a potential utopia for them.

In the controls she presented to manage fly-related hazards, I noticed parallels to controls for preventing and catching bugs in software:

  • Make sanitation a priority. Clean up messes, take out the trash on a daily basis, and clean the insides of trash bins. In software development, don’t leave your messes to other people — or your future self!  Bake time into your development schedule to refactor on a regular basis. And remember to maintain your test tools! If you’re doing test-driven development with old tools, even your trash bins may be harboring additional risks.
  • Swap outdoor lighting. In food production facilities, it’s important to use lighting that doesn’t bring the flies to you (particularly at night). Similarly, in software, examine your environment to make sure there are no “bug attractors” like lack of communication or effective version control, dependencies on buggy packages or third party tools, or lack of structured and systematic development processes.
  • Install automatic doors to limit the amount of time and space available for flies to get in to the facility. In software, this relates to limiting the complexity of your code and strategically implementing testing, e.g. test-driven development or an emphasis on hardening the most critical and/or frequently used parts of your system.
  • Inspect loading and unloading areas and seal cracks and crevices. Keep tight seals around critical areas. The “tight seals” in software development are the structured, systematic processes related to verifying and validating your code. This includes design reviews, pair programming, sign-offs, integration and regression testing, and user acceptable testing.
  • Clean drains on a regular basis. The message here is that flies can start their lives in any location that’s suitable for their growth, and you should look for those places and keep them sanitized too. In software, this suggests an ongoing examination of technical debt. Where are the drains that could harbor new issues? Find them, monitor them, and manage them.

Although clearly there’s a huge difference between pest management in food and beverage production and managing code quality, process-related pests have been an issue for at least a century — and likely throughout history. What are the flies in your industry, and what are you doing to make sure they don’t contaminate your systems and bring you down?

Happy World Quality Day 2018!

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Each year, the second Thursday of November day is set aside to reflect on the way quality management can contribute to our work and our lives. Led by the Chartered Quality Institute (CQI) in the United Kingdom, World Quality Day provides a forum to reflect on how we implement more effective processes and systems that positively impact KPIs and business results — and celebrate outcomes and new insights.

This year’s theme is “Quality: A Question of Trust”.

We usually think of quality as an operations function. The quality system (whether we have quality management software implemented or not) helps us keep track of the health and effectiveness of our manufacturing, production, or service processes. Often, we do this to obtain ISO 9001:2015 certification, or achieve outcomes that are essential to how the public perceives us, like reducing scrap, rework, and customer complaints.

But the quality system encompasses all the ways we organize our business — ensuring that people, processes, software, and machines are aligned to meet strategic and operational goals. For example, QMS validation (which is a critical for quality management in the pharmaceutical industry), helps ensure that production equipment is continuously qualified to meet performance standards, and trust is not broken. Intelex partner Glemser Technologies explains in more detail in The Definitive Guide to Validating Your QMS in the Cloud. This extends to managing supplier relationships — building trust to cultivate rich partnerships in the business ecosystem out of agreements to work together.

This also extends to building and cultivating trust-based relationships with our colleagues, partners, and customers…

…

Read more about how Integrated Management Systems and Industry 4.0/ Quality 4.0 are part of this dynamic: https://community.intelex.com/explore/posts/world-quality-day-2018-question-trust

Quality 4.0 in Basic Terms (Interview)

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On October 12th I dialed in to Quality Digest Live to chat with Dirk Dusharne, Editor-in-Chief of Quality Digest, about Quality 4.0 and my webinar on the topic which was held yesterday (October 16).

Check out my 13-minute interview here, starting at 14:05! It answers two questions:

  • What is Quality 4.0 – in really basic terms that are easy to remember?
  • How can we use these emerging technologies to support engagement and collaboration?

You can also read more about the topic here on the Intelex Community, or come to ASQ’s Quality 4.0 Summit in Dallas next month where I’ll be sharing more information along with other Quality 4.0 leaders like Jim Duarte of LJDUARTE and Associates and Dan Jacob of LNS Research.

Quality 4.0: Let’s Get Digital

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Want to find out what Quality 4.0 really is — and start realizing the benefits for your organization? If so, check out the October 2018 issue of ASQ’s Quality Progress, where my new article (“Let’s Get Digital“) does just that.

Quality 4.0 asks how we can leverage connected, intelligent, automated (C-I-A) technologies to increase efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction: “As connected, intelligent and automated systems are more widely adopted, we can once again expect a renaissance in quality tools and methods.” In addition, we’re working to bring this to the forefront of quality management and quality engineering practice at Intelex.

Quality 4.0 Evolution

The progression can be summarized through four themes. We’re in the “quality as discovery” stage today:

  • Quality as inspection: In the early days, quality assurance relied on inspecting bad quality out of items produced. Walter A. Shewhart’s methods for statistical process control (SPC) helped operators determine whether variation was due to random or special causes.
  • Quality as design: Next, more holistic methods emerged for designing quality in to processes. The goal is to prevent quality problems before they occur. These movements were inspired by W. Edwards Deming’s push to cease dependence on inspection, and Juran’s Quality by Design.
  • Quality as empowerment: By the 1990’s, organizations adopting TQM and Six Sigma advocated a holistic approach to quality. Quality is everyone’s responsibility and empowered individuals contribute to continuous improvement.
  • Quality as discovery: Because of emerging technologies, we’re at a new frontier. In an adaptive, intelligent environment, quality depends on how:
    • quickly we can discover and aggregate new data sources,
    • effectively we can discover root causes and
    • how well we can discover new insights about ourselves, our products and our organizations.”

Read more at http://asq.org/quality-progress/2018/10/basic-quality/lets-get-digital.html  or download the PDF (http://asq.org/quality-progress/2018/10/basic-quality/lets-get-digital.pdf)

Practical Poka-Yoke

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My Story

A couple hours ago, I went to the ATM machine.

I don’t use cash often, so I haven’t been to an ATM machine in several months. Regardless, I’m fully accustomed to the pattern: put card in, enter secret code, tell the machine what I want, get my money, take my card.

This time, my money was taking a looonnnnnnnngggg time to pop out.

Maybe there’s a problem with the connection? Maybe I should check back later? I sat in my car thinking about what the best plan of action would be… and then I decided to read the screen. (Who needs to read the screen? We all know what’s supposed to happen… right? Once, I was even able to use an ATM machine entirely in the Icelandic language just because I knew the pattern.)

PLEASE TAKE YOUR CARD TO DISPENSE FUNDS, it said.

This is one of the simplest and greatest examples of poka-yoke (or “mistake-proofing”) I’ve ever seen. I had to take my card out and put it away before I could get my money! I was highly motivated to get my money (I mean, that’s the specific thing I came to the ATM to get). Of course I’m going to do what you want, ATM! The machine forced me to take my card — and prevented me from accidentally leaving my card in the machine. This could be problematic for both me and the bank.

The History

Why have I never seen this before? Why don’t other ATMs do this? I went on an intellectual fishing expedition and found out that no, the idea is not new… Lockton et al. (2010) said:

A major opportunity for error with historic ATMs came from a user leaving his or her ATM card in the machine’s slot after the procedure of dispensing cash or other account activity was complete (Rogers et al., 1996, Rogers and Fisk, 1997). This was primarily because the [ATM dispensed the cash] before the card was returned (i.e. a different sequence for Plan 3 in the HTA of Fig. 3), leading to a postcompletion error—“errors such as leaving the original document behind in a photocopier… [or] forgetting to replace the gas cap after filling the tank” (Byrne and Bovair, 1997). Postcompletion error is an error of omission (Matthews et al., 2000); the user’s main goal (Plan 0 in Fig. 3) of getting cash was completed so the further “hanging postcompletion action” (Chung and Byrne, 2008) of retrieving the card was easily forgotten.

The obvious design solution was, as Chung and Byrne (2008) put it, “to place the hanging postcompletion action ‘on the critical path’ to reduce or eliminate [its] omission” and this is what the majority of current ATMs feature (Freed and Remington, 2000): an interlock forcing function (Norman, 1988) or control poka-yoke (Shingo, 1986), requiring the user to remove the card before the cash is dispensed. Zimmerman and Bridger (2000) found that a ‘card-returned-then-cash-dispensed’ ATM dialogue design was at least 22% more efficient (in withdrawal time) and resulted in 100% fewer lost cards (i.e. none) compared with a ‘cash-dispensed-then-card-returned’ dialogue design.

I don’t think the most compelling message here has anything to do with design or ATMs, but with the value of hidden gems tucked into research papers.  There can be a long lag time between generating genius ideas and making them useful to real people.

One of my goals over the next few years is to help as many of these nuggets get into the mainstream as possible. If you’ve learned something from research that would benefit quality or business, get in touch. I want to hear from you!

Reference

Lockton, D., Harrison, D., & Stanton, N. A. (2010). The Design with Intent Method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour. Applied ergonomics, 41(3), 382-392.

Value Propositions for Quality 4.0

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In previous articles, we introduced Quality 4.0, the pursuit of performance excellence as an integral part of an organization’s digital transformation. It’s one aspect of Industry 4.0 transformation towards intelligent automation: smart, hyperconnected(*) agents deployed in environments where humans and machines cooperate and leverage data to achieve shared goals.

Automation is a spectrum: an operator can specify a process that a computer or intelligent agent executes, the computer can make decisions for an operator to approve or adjust, or the computer can make and execute all decisions. Similarly, machine intelligence is a spectrum: an algorithm can provide advice, take action with approvals or adjustments, or take action on its own. We have to decide what value is generated when we introduce various degrees of intelligence and automation in our organizations.

How can Quality 4.0 help your organization? How can you improve the performance of your people, projects, products, and entire organizations by implementing technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, and blockchain?

A value proposition is a statement that explains what benefits a product or activity will deliver. Quality 4.0 initiatives have these kinds of value propositions:

  1. Augment (or improve upon) human intelligence
  2. Increase the speed and quality of decision-making
  3. Improve transparency, traceability, and auditability
  4. Anticipate changes, reveal biases, and adapt to new circumstances and knowledge
  5. Evolve relationships and organizational boundaries to reveal opportunities for continuous improvement and new business models
  6. Learn how to learn; cultivate self-awareness and other-awareness as a skill

Quality 4.0 initiatives add intelligence to monitoring and managing operations – for example, predictive maintenance can help you anticipate equipment failures and proactively reduce downtime. They can help you assess supply chain risk on an ongoing basis, or help you decide whether to take corrective action. They can also improve help you improve cybersecurity: documenting and benchmarking processes can provide a basis for detecting anomalies, and understanding expected performance can help you detect potential attacks.

(*) Hyperconnected = (nearly) always on, (nearly) always accessible.

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