5. Quality: Actionable Items, Pareto Charts, and Fact-based Management

Bill Harreld:
Actionable items are used to improve the plans, improve the processes, and to improve the results. To be actionable, you should be able to use that information and get key business processes. Because if it's not actionable, it doesn't relate to what you're doing in the business, so actionable items are directly related to our processes.

What can we do to improve our processes? Analyzing and understanding the needs or the action are very widely used. How the product or service quality improvement correlates with the customer satisfaction. How it correlates with improvement, to improve the future… so it avoids future complaints.

Action depends upon understanding cause and effect connections among processes and between processes.

Another element is analysis to gain understanding of needed actions, may vary widely. How a product or service quality improvement correlates with customer satisfaction, determines whether it's an actionable item. Another one is how does a product… how a product or service improvement can prevent future complaints or provide more… satisfaction for the customer.

A Pareto chart… demonstrates the values of whatever it is we're… measuring or…. compiling and it's… represented in descending order. The most important item is the largest bar. The next important item is a smaller bar and on down the line until you find… typically, you'll find the first five or six bars almost take 90% of the… value of what you're measuring.

Those… management and intuition elements are we're managing with facts. Often it's numbers or direct customer statements to decide plans and actions and directions, goals and results for our business. So we need to actually get to know that customer, and know them well, and pose the right questions so that we can find out what do they need, so that our leadership can guide and direct our organization to provide the needs of the customer.

When we look at measurements, we can look at things intuitively; however, we should be able to reduce those to facts. Get facts to support our intuitive thought. All too often people try to run by, the saying goes, the seat of their pants. And they're guessing what is the correct answer, or dismissing measurement information, whereas if they would try to… reduce most of it to facts to help support their intuitive thought, then I think we're going to have a much better organization, provide better results, and provide better customer satisfaction.