You’re about to make, or are in the middle of making a change at your organization and are wondering, is this change really going to stick?  How do I prevent this change becoming the improvement flavor of the month?  Or maybe your change is moving right along and you just want to ensure it stays on track.  Below is the first thing you can do to ensure the change you’re making is a sustainable solution for your organization.

1. Define the problem, and I mean really define the problem.  

What exactly is the customer upset about?  What business process is associated with this that needs improving?  What does the customer consider a defect in the process?  You may be asking yourself which customer am I referring to?  The customer in this case is the person, department, or external customer raising the issue.  Customers can be internal or  external to your organization.  

Getting back to what the customer wants, the only way you’re going to know exactly what the customer wants is to get the Voice of the Customer.  This means talking to the customer directly, sending them a survey, or some other means to get the customer’s direct input.  It is very important to get this information directly from the customer to avoid a case of telephone game gone wrong and a lot of time and energy spent solving the wrong problem.  

Once the Voice of the Customer has been gathered, now it’s time to translate that information into the customer’s Critical to Quality (CTQ) characteristics.  What are the customer’s CTQ characteristics?  CTQs are the most important measurable characteristics of the process being delivered to the customer and what the customer will use to determine whether the product or service being delivered is considered “good”.  For a Receiving Process, one CTQ may be a dock to stock cycle time of <2 hours.  For an employee engagement process, one CTQ may be an employee Net Promoter Score of >30.  For an IT Support Process, one CTQ may be an uptime of at least 99.99% / month.

Once you have what you think are the customer’s CTQs, it’s time to validate them with the customer.  Again, this is to avoid a lot of time and energy spent focused on an area that isn’t important to the customer.  Once the customer says, yes those are the things most important to me and what I consider to be “good”, now you know how to measure at the end of the project whether your change in the organization was successful and will be appreciated by the customer.  

Click here for the second thing you can do to ensure the change you’re making is a sustainable solution for your organization.

Call to Action

• What is one takeaway you’ll be putting into action?  Use the comment feature to share your thoughts.

• Found this blog useful or know someone this can help?  Please share it with your network. 

• If there’s a particular change agent topic you’d like to see covered on this blog, please comment. 

About the Author: Rosanne Essiambre helps change agents and departments in one-on-one and group settings to be seen, be heard, and be effective in bringing about change in the organization and/or in their personal lives. She provides consulting and facilitation to organizations to improve communications and collaboration, smooth out the change / transformation journey, get to the root cause of an issue so it can be solved for good, improve processes, and implement successful lessons learned. And she conducts workshops, trains, and speaks on Energy Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Resilience, Being a Change Agent and more. If you or your organization could use support with your change effort or some inspiration, contact Rosanne for a complimentary consultation. Rosanne is a Change Agent Coach, Facilitator, Six Sigma Black Belt, Change Management / Continuous Improvement Consultant, Speaker, and Energy Leadership Index Master Practitioner with more than 20 years experience working on a variety of transformations across a diverse set of industries both domestically and internationally, while continuously improving herself.