In a global economy where digital products, solutions, and innovations reign supreme, moving too fast is an all-too-easy trap to which an innumerable number of projects fall victim. It’s an (perhaps, the) Achilles’ heel of successful project completion and benefits realization. While it is not the sole challenge that adversely impacts a project, in my experience, it possesses the strongest influence on the outcome of an initiative. Given the nature of the digital landscape, the success of an organization and its competitive advantage relies on how quickly a team can deliver innovative solutions to internal and external customers.
While of course there is value in moving fast, moving too quickly risks catastrophe. By expediting the product development process, companies fail to properly assess and understand the needs of their customers before building and implementing solutions intended to meet consumer desires. This is exactly where leaders need to step in and where lean product and process development (LPPD) can help.
It’s critical that leaders build their team’s capability to “understand before they execute,” a guiding principal of LPPD. This means implementing material steps to effectively shield against unnecessary mishaps that may result in added costs, extended timelines, or, even more dramatically, a dissolution of the business.
For example, when I work with product teams, I encourage team members to gain a holistic understanding of the needs of the customer and what legitimate issues may exist. Through three simple steps within a project plan, teams can develop an intimate knowledge base of customer issues, delineate between symptoms and root causes, and evaluate a proposed solution to ensure effectiveness before time, money, and resources have been dedicated:
- Perform a thorough current-state analysis predicated on the voice of the customer (VoC)
- Complete a robust root cause analysis to uncover fundamental drivers of problems, as opposed to solutioning against symptoms
- Design an optimized future state based on findings from root cause analysis, one that is, again, focused on the VoC.
Performing these steps can be challenging in workplaces with distributed teams or remote environments, and it’s often harder to slow down and do this work when teams are creating digital products and services. However, the tools and methods exist that allow lean and six sigma experts to facilitate a profound understanding of customer needs as well as the development of a potent solution that resolves issues stemming from the VoC analysis.
Virtual whiteboards can allow for real-time collaboration when drawing the current-state analysis. Fishbone diagrams can be populated “async” (or offline) to collect feedback from multiple team members. There are many tools available if working with Lean principles is an organizational priority. Then it’s about “building in learning and knowledge reuse,” and, as Jim Morgan writes, creating a system that “encourages rapid learning, reuses existing knowledge, and captures new knowledge to make it easier to use in the future helps you build a long-term competitive advantage.”
Sounds good, right? But what if you work in an organization where teams are pressed to move as quickly as possible? An effective leader can always make a choice to take the time to truly understand customer needs and gather the right data to inform an intelligent design. This is what ultimately fast-tracks a sustainable, effective solution.
