Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Part 2: Products & Services: Who's right and who's wrong?

As soon as we had our list of Attributes the discussions about who was right and who was wrong immediately started. That is not to say there were heated exchanges in the hallways and out on the shop floor. More like self-satisfied smirks from the Engineers, "I told you so's" from Sales, and "You never listen's" from just about everyone else.

So the next step was to figure out who was right. But before we did that we needed to create and test a methodology to quantify everyone's perceptions. Enter The Survey. At this point most people within the company, other than perhaps those in Sales, had not yet figured out who the "who" was in "who was right." ~ My apologies to my high school English teachers and my academic parents for not knowing whether, when or where to use the word "whom."

The Survey was designed to allow everyone to personally evaluate each of the product Attributes. For practical purposes the list was again distilled down to a total of 25 descriptors. And respondents from all areas of the company were asked to rate each Attribute against the following two scales:

A) Importance: 
  1. = very low
  2. = low
  3. = neutral
  4. = important
  5. = very important

B) Performance vs 'Best in Class'  
  1. = very poor
  2. = poor
  3. = neutral
  4. = better
  5. = much better

When the results were collected they were presented on a 2-axes chart. The X-axes or bottom axes measured Performance. So the further to the right the better the "perceived" Performance vs 'Best in Class.' And the Y-axes or vertical axes measured "perceived" Importance. So the higher up the Attribute the greater the "perceived" Importance and so on.

Taken a step further, Attributes close to the top right were "perceived" to be very Important and our company was "perceived" to be much better than our 'Best in Class' competitor. Likewise for Attributes that appeared in the bottom left of the chart we "perceived" that we did not perform very well compared to our 'Best in Class' competitors, however we also did not "perceive" that these were very Important.

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