HOW TO: Limit WIP #7: Understand Your Customers

In this series, we’ve been discussing the psychology of your work, the sized of tasks, how we complete certain types of tasks, and who / what might interrupt us.Perhaps it’s time to understand the consumers of our tasks: our customers. When we do something, even if it is simply relaxing, there is a potential beneficiary of that task.We do things. Those things we loosely call “work”. “Work” has a “work product”. “Work products” should have some value for somebody. That somebody is the customer.Customers can include:

• those paying money for the work (the traditional customer)

• our bosses (corporate hierarchy)

• colleagues, coworkers, partners (corporate culture)

• regulators or agents of an authority (bureaucracy)

• family (family)

• friends and neighbors (society)

• ourselves (ourselves)

And there are likely other customers and subdivisions of these customers.If you are doing things that have no value to anyone … why are you doing them?To limit our WIP, we need to make sure we are doing the right thing.But even if we know it's the right task, are we doing the thing right? To learn this, we must ask ourselves:

• What does our customer want?

• What is the highest value they can get from my work?

• Do I have time to give them that value?

• How much value can I get done in the time I have?

• Will that level of value be sufficient?

We often find ourselves saying “no” to that last question, but continuing to do the work anyway.When we know our work is going to be of insufficient quality, we tend to become aggravated. We feel annoyance at the task, at those who asked us to do the task, an ourselves for getting stuck in a situation like this. This annoyance increases the chance that our work product will be of low quality – making the work even more insufficient.If we didn’t want to do a good job, this would not be a problem.Since we do, there are five quick actions we should take when we understand we have a customer:

• Be clear about what they want – Yes, this sounds obvious, but how many times have you had to rework something because of a simple initial lack of understanding?

• Be clear about what is on your plate – No, sorry Miss Customer, you are not the only thing I am doing right now. I wish you were, but life doesn’t work like that. Here’s what I can realistically do.

• Get their feedback early and often – How soon can you show them an interim product? How quickly can you compare expected and actual progress? Earlier feedback = earlier delivery.

• Understand minimum and optimal deliverables – Minimum and optimum deliverables give you a range of success to shoot for. If you are always aiming for the high point, you will usually underdeliver.

• Work is a relationship – All work is a relationship between the person doing the work and the person receiving it. Communication (again as early as possible) helps both cement the relationship and ensure an appreciated delivery.

It's simple, if we don't know who it is for, we don't know what we are doing. If we don't know what we are doing, how can we limit our work-in-progress?

Failure Demand and Unthoughtful Production: Lean Muppet Series Post 2

The Ernie Production Unit and the Bert Client Clash Over Delivered Value

simon marcus

Ernie and Bert have issues. Because Ernie and Bert are archetypes. They represent the Yin and Yang of the Human condition.It is reasonable to expect that anyone reading this is human.In this video, Ernie is a standard production unit. At times he is painting (development), other times he is reassuring Bert that the product will be done on time and to spec (product manager or sales), at one point he presents the finished product for use (installation or delivery).Bert goes through some stages in his position as the customer: thanking Ernie for his services, then becoming antsy when the schedule might overrun, then frustrated when the product is defective.As Bert goes through these stages, he places pressure on the production unit. When the delivery of the defective unit is made however, the customer's understandably righteous indignation  "ERNIE! THAT DOESN'T LOOK ANYTHING LIKE ME!!!!"  is met with surprise by production "It doesn't, Bert?"Development built a product for their idea of Bert, and not the actual Bert. "I must say that it looks exactly like you Bert, I did a fantastic job," Ernie says on delivery.(Apparently, they thought Bert was my good friend Simon Marcus...who looks a lot like the picture on the right).Not showing the product to the client while it was in production coupled with the high cost of change leads to the only conclusion - production must physically change the client to conform to the product. In this case, turning Bert the Muppet into Simon the COO.This radical alteration of Bert is funny and it even makes adults laugh, but we do it all the time in business. We give people what they don't want and then we spend money in support or training or advertising to counteract our shoddy or unthoughtful work. This is what John Seddon calls "failure demand" - the spending of resources we engage in to make up for the failures we build in to our own products.When we build shoddy or unthoughtful products, they cost us - in money, time, and consumer good will.