To gather the VOC, effective methods for accurately capturing customer requirements are required. Several methods are available to capture the VOC.
- Interviews are used to gather information from stakeholders by talking to them directly. Interviews aid in identifying and defining features and functions or desired project deliverables.
- Focus groups is a trained moderator-guided interactive discussion that includes pre-qualified stakeholders and subject-matter experts (SMEs) to elicit their expectations and attitudes toward the proposed product, service, or result of the project.
- Facilitated workshops is an interactive group-focused sessions that bring together key cross-functional stakeholders to define the project or product requirements. It is a primary technique to define cross-functional requirements and reconcile stakeholder differences to the project. Facilitated workshops occur much faster than individual discussions.
- Questionnaires and surveys is another method where written sets of questions designed to quickly gather information from a broad audience.
- Mystery shopping commonly performed in retail industries. This method is used to measure the quality of a service by gathering specific information about the product or service. This method is performed by mystery shoppers who introduce themselves as customers and perform specific customer-related tasks, such as purchasing a product and raising questions and complaints about the product.
- Observations are a direct way of viewing individuals in their work environment or while using the product to identify the project or product requirements. Also referred to as job shadowing.
- Market research is an organized effort to gather information about the current trends in an industry and also Field reports is a formal report documented by field engineers or other on-site personnel who gather required information about events that occur during their field work.
- Customer feedback and complaints data are used to gather customer requirements. This method also involves gathering customer feedback about the quality of a product or service. The consolidated list of feedback from customers is referred to as complaints data.
- Reliability data is a source of information that helps in analyzing the reliability of a product or process. By gathering this data, you can plan strategies to gain a reputation with customers as a reliable provider of services.
- Staff feedback is another method of gathering opinions from staff who interact with customers directly or who possess knowledge about customers and their expectations. This information is captured by conducting surveys, brainstorming sessions, and other information gathering sessions.
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In a recent Lean Six Sigma Project kick-off meeting of one of my clients, after the teams presented their project charters, the business leader made an extempore announcement that the best and most successful Lean Six Sigma project will receive a special recognition and the team members will be lucratively rewarded.
Immediately few of them wanted to know what criteria will be used for selection. The business leader indicated that I will be one who will define the criteria for successful Lean Six Sigma Project.
Factors that I consider among the criteria for success of Lean Six Sigma Projects are arranged in the descending order of their importance in the below list:
Project Scope – Lean Six Sigma projects without well-defined scope are bound to fail, but they end up creating a lot of mess around. Scope usually refers to the boundaries of any project. A poorly defined project is one which hasn’t balanced the Project Goal, Scope and Timelines. Also, poorly communicated scope and not defining what is out of scope are equally important.
Retains interest and commitment of the resources – Improvement projects are successful when its team members contribute their best. Lean Six Sigma projects usually challenge the existing paradigm. Hence without the wholehearted and continued participation of the team members, no project will be successful. The sponsor/champion and the Green Belt/Black Belt are entrusted to retain the interest and commitment of the resources.
Attracts adequate buy-in from key stakeholders – Stakeholders of any project could either be the decision makers, important players who influence the decisions or even impacted parties. Successful Lean Six Sigma projects will have to manage the expectations of all the above stakeholders from time to time and create adequate buy-in. Rather than focusing too much on technical root cause analysis, the emphasis should be on how Lean Six Sigma project can bring about mid-to-large change in the organization.
Flawless execution– Immaterial of the breadth and depth of the analysis done in any Lean Six Sigma project, what sticks out is execution. Well led and implemented the project is bound to be successful, as even the quality of data collected and analysis is a function of the flawless execution. Adherence to weekly team meetings, project milestones, and tollgates reviews are some simple and easy signs to evaluate execution. Further unbiased data collection and analysis, open minded assessment of solutions, in-depth piloting and sustained monitoring are additional measures of flawless execution.
Identifiable impact on customers– As the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so is the success of any Lean Six Sigma in positive impact it creates on customers. Usually, organizations evaluate the success of projects based on the performance of the CTQ (before-after studies). While this is definitely a good way to assess the impact, more often than not such movements in CTQs aren’t felt by customers. Considering several other business parameters to validate the impact of the CTQ, including post improvement Voice of Customer may be a very good method. For example, a reduction in defects certainly will reduce the rework effort, increase productivity, reduce complaints, apart from increasing customer satisfaction.
Making a discovery – Any successful Lean Six Sigma project should unearth something new, make a discovery about the problem. A project without a discovery could mean we are fixing obvious things. In order to ensure the project team makes a discovery, the quality of work done in the Measure and Analyze phase have to be evaluated. Have the teams identified all possible causes to the problem? Have they collected data of good quality and quantity? Have they holistically analyzed the data to make the discovery? And finally what is the discovery?
Based on my experience with Lean Six Sigma in the last 2 decades, I would consider these 6 factors as significant elements of the successful project.
