Last week in the first of this five-part series, I covered really defining the problem using voice of the customer (VOC) and critical to quality (CTQ) characteristics will start you on the path to ensuring the change you’re making is a sustainable solution for your organization (Click here to revisit Part 1 - Define the Problem). Below is the second thing you can do to avoid your change becoming the flavor of the month.

2. Measure the process you think is causing the problem.

Now that you think you know the process to be improved, measure how well the process is currently performing before any change is made.  What specifically do you measure?  Measure the customer’s CTQs.  

Why measure the customer’s CTQs before any change is made?  Two significant reasons, what happens if you measure the customer’s CTQs and the process is already meeting them?  Now you know there isn’t actually a problem with this particular process and can circle back to Number 1 and identify where the real problem is.  This actually happens a lot and remember, it’s better to find this out now rather than after you’ve spent 4 months making a change that wasn’t actually needed!  

The other reason it’s important to measure before making any change is so you have a baseline of the process and can determine after the change is made whether it improved, worsened, or had no effect on the process.  Because without a baseline, how would you quantifiably know the effect the change had and whether you actually improved the process for the customer?

Take recent events as an example.  Without measuring how many confirmed cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) there are in a facility such as the nursing home in Washington, then how do facility leaders know whether improvements to their infection prevention and control process are reducing the number of patients being infected?  Now in this example, it’s pretty clear it’s vital to be measuring the CTQ characteristic of number of patients infected.  However in many organizations, many times the CTQs are never measured before process changes are made and everyone is left wondering whether the changes made had any effect at all.

Next week I’ll cover the third 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 in 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.