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John Carter

Are Quality Certifications A Waste Of Time?

Quality certifications, such as Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, were created for a laudable purpose. They were intended to professionalize quality improvement and support a standard of practice around it. They also codified a body of knowledge and provided an industry recognition for excellence in quality improvement.

Unfortunately, many of these certifications have been on the shelf well past their sell-by date. Despite noble intentions, in many cases the application of the methods associated with these programs waste time and effort. This means that today these programs are defeating the purpose for which they were created.

What’s Wrong With Certifications?

The problem with these certifications is two-fold:

1. In most cases the quality improvement curriculum is oriented toward traditional, high velocity manufacturing. The methods they teach are increasingly irrelevant to information-based economies. An economy based on IT, service, and finance industries or on network-facilitation (e.g. eBay, Facebook, and Uber) benefit little from implementing tools intended for the assembly of mechanical components.

Many certification programs teach arcane methodologies, dependent upon probability and statistics, that are irrelevant to business challenges in the world’s more developed economies. While statistical analysis is applicable to attribute data, such data does not require a strong emphasis on tools such as analysis of variance (ANOVA) techniques.

2. The more insidious problem is that these certification programs encourage students to follow to the letter a set of predetermined steps. The dogmatic adherence to these procedures diminishes the importance of judgment, insight and creativity in the domain of process improvement. Sacrifices are made on the altar of data for the sake of data. This results in wasted effort and wasted time – which are, again, the very defects that the quality movement was intended to mitigate. Improvement teams take far too long to diagnose and implement urgently needed improvements because they’re following by rote a set of prescriptive guidelines that were written for processes that are past their prime.

Once a set of standards has been institutionalized in the form of a certification with its attendant curriculum, it tends to take on a life of its own. Managers who have toiled to earn the certification defend the validity of the processes they have learned, convinced that following the right steps will ensure a positive outcome. But slavish adherence to a process for its own sake is devoid of common sense. Companies should have enough process, but not one iota more.

Further, the time spent in learning and applying archaic methods means less time for new process improvement innovations that are required to meet a host of management challenges that companies face today. The insistence on older methods slows down the pace of improvement and impedes process innovation.

A New Quality Movement

The quality movement needs a refresh. The first step is to change the orientation from an exclusive manufacturing focus to a new set of tools that will meet the needs of other sectors as well. Even in more traditional manufacturing environments much of the quality curriculum is out of date and creates wasted effort. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, professionals who have a stake in process improvement should re-evaluate the existing body of knowledge, preserving what is best in the older methods while modernizing the curriculum.

Second, there needs to be a new wave of process innovation. Today’s information and service-based firms need new methods, tools and remedies oriented toward qualitative in addition to quantitative skills. For instance, they need repeatable methods for ensuring high quality results in processing language data and attribute data (such as the Affinity Diagram). Just as Deming and others did in the post-WWII world, we need a new quality revolution to meet today’s challenges.

Finally, we need to encourage individual judgment, creativity and flexibility in quality improvement activities. The certification practicum and the courseware need to reflect the role of insight and business acumen in improving process quality. Methods need to be customizable and flexible to meet the needs of a world in which business model innovation has become an increasingly important basis of competition.

The original intention of the quality movement was to turn process improvement into a repeatable, sustainable capability. By making the changes described above, industry could serve this aim by retooling certifications to provide a far more powerful toolbox for meeting today’s challenges.

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John Carter

How Start-Ups Can Avoid Costly Crashes

Don't fall off that cliff!  TrustedPeer John Carter offers advice on using Predictive Metrics to ensure a successful Start-Up.  

Download his Keynote Presentation for the Clean Tech Open Conference here.

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John Carter

Who's Driving Your Product Roadmap?

Our clients are finding that Product Roadmaps can attempt to serve two masters and fail both. For example, we’ve seen Sales teams insert a customer’s pet feature into the product plan in order to close a sale. At the same time, Product Management uses the roadmap to assure the CEO that they plan to support her vision even though Engineering has not even seen it. To use Product Roadmaps at cross-purposes misses the point of the tool.

In other cases, Product Roadmaps are cartoonish and made to satisfy eager B2B customers. They lack real meaning or vitality for an organization that desperately needs the strategic clarity that they foster.

A Product Roadmap is a visual representation of a company’s product strategy. It helps orient Engineering, Marketing, Sales, support, and the C-suite towards common product development goals. Its benefits include:

  • Inspiring the organization to see how they might get operational leverage by creating derivative products off of platforms
  • Setting expectations for when the organization will deliver products/services to market
  • Serving as an organizing principle for decisions around technology requirements, resource allocation, and product positioning
  • Moving the organization to think about conflicts in resources and potential bottlenecks.

A Product Roadmap spans two product cycles (about 24-36 months) with a monthly granularity at most. The vertical axis is the most important strategically. It represents the products, how they relate to each other, and how they might relate to the competition in ways that matter. Although cost is the most common value for the vertical axis, it can also plot speed or the key-feature parameter.

Articulating a common vision for success is hardly a new concept, although it is rarely the case that all stakeholders and contributors comprehend the vision fully. What is new is the emphasis on how product differentiation supports competitive advantage. When product innovation is more important than distribution strategy, or financial engineering, the Product Roadmap is your most important planning document.

Your company can generate a product plan from a variety of sources. Some, however, are based on a functionally-focused view of the problems you are trying to solve: Engineering sees it one way, Marketing another, and Sales yet another. Such views rarely incorporate sufficient inputs. They tend to be neither reliable nor comprehensive.

A robust Product Roadmap is driven by Marketing, but created cross-functionally and reviewed and approved by the C-suite. You should not communicate it outside of the company unless it is sanitized and approved by management. Rather, use it to focus the organization on the sequence of products you will develop over time.

The Product Roadmap is a living document that serves as a repository for project ideas that are ready to enter the product development process. Review and update it on a quarterly basis at a minimum.

Which Business Problems Does the Tool Solve?

Often individuals and managers in organizations say that there is no strategy, or if it exists, they say that it is poorly communicated. An often-referenced Product Roadmap allows for better strategic alignment and, as a result, greater engagement. It also helps the executive management team and product marketing to manage the inputs that feed the new product development process.

While a Product Roadmap should never preclude competitive reactions or innovation from “cutting in front of the line,” it does provide an active plan for what should be next in line for development. The active use of a Product Roadmap enables innovation in two ways:

  • It communicates what is important to the organization.
  • It provides a strategic context for engineers, researchers, and other creative individuals to create concepts that support, complement, and extend the strategic intent of the roadmap.

Finally, Product Roadmaps can communicate the international launch strategy. They enable the organization to plan the timing for entry into different markets and anticipate regulatory approvals, language, localization, and standards.

What Else You Should Know

The most useful Product Roadmaps anticipate and lead changes in the market, in channels, in the supply chain, and in the competitive landscape. “Shooting in front of the duck” is important because, in most industries, you have to anticipate what your competitors will have in the market when you launch your product 12 months from now.

Some Product Roadmaps are useless because they focus on the graphics. A meaningful Product Roadmap should be a two-axis graph showing, accurately and in detail, the timetable for launches and the relationships between products. The roadmap must show the delineated features of each product and how one offering differs from another.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The material in this blog originally appeared on John Carter's website, http://www.tcgen.com, as "Product Roadmap:  Clarifying Your Product Direction."

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