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February 17, 2007

Split P Soup

Be careful what you ask for. This is the part everyone already knows to heed, but who actually does?

Here's a favorite view of the intensive efforts made to satisfy the customer: Forbell's "Splitting Peas for Split Pea Soup" printed in Old "Judge" Magazine. We love the "system" of production controls, and the implication that the overkill is necessary to get the soup right.

This worked for Andersen's Pea Soup Restaurant in old Buellton California; the "home of pea soup", they were very clear on what their customer wanted, and they did that one thing well.

But isn't that the exception? From what we read and hear, throughout many fields of effort, from projects to purchasing, failure or buyer's remorse is easily just as common as their opposites. Despite decades of programmatic attention to "improvement", things have only marginally improved when it comes to actually wanting what gets delivered.

This obviously suggests that the supply side of improvement is only part of the problem. The other part has to be on the demand side. But as the customer, we're supposed to be always right. So why do we not get what we want? Because we don't ask for it. We might only ask for what is "high priority", to try to reduce the risk; but what does "priority" really mean?

Most often, the problem with priorities is that the way they relate to the "want" isn't understood or isn't communicated. They wind up being not ambiguous but out of context, leaving it much more likely that other parties responding to them (as providers or stakeholders) will respond the wrong way or simply disagree.

To sort this out, we have to trace the "priority" back to what made it a priority, and set that out as an explicit part of the receiver's specification for the deliverable. As seen in the picture below, this will show four different aspects that may get evaluated when the deliverable arrives. The risk is that the provider and the receiver didn't agree, in the first place, on what mattered -- making the deliverable less tolerable, suitable, usable or whatever, having not met the unstated criteria... At the point of delivery, disagreements about whether the right thing was provided often seem to be about splitting hairs, and the reality is that the hair to be split is what was meant by "priority".

In this framework, it's clear that the key points to consider are neither indefinite nor synonymous. And that is why they are not interchangeable. Thus it is easy to get one or another of them right, only to find out that whatever wasn't addressed will cause a "failure" or buyer's remorse.

The sophisticated customer or likewise provider will recognize in advance that all these different aspects must be accounted for: each one either satisfied or ruled out, in an agreement between the supplier and the customer. For example: take television commercials for successful "diet programs" -- now they must try harder to pre-empt deal-breakers, because the key considerations of most potential customers are well acknowledged to "cover the bases"...

With an opportunity to identify issues in advance this way, there's much less reason to tolerate asking (or being asked) for the wrong thing. We see the path to getting it right.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at February 17, 2007 11:55 AM

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