[Toronto] October - Fit for Purpose (F4P)

Overview

How do you know why your customers select you and your products and services? How do you know whether a change to a product or service will represent an improvement? How do you select new features, functions and classes of service? How do you manage your portfolio of products and services and the market segments you serve? How do you find, select, and grow market segments? How do you identify segments that you don’t serve well and should be switched off? This class will answer all of these questions and more… This is the 2-day class developed from the recent book, Fit For Purpose – how modern businesses find, satisfy & keep customers, by David J. Anderson & Alexei Zheglov. This class presents a significant part of the strategic planning, marketing, market research, product management and service design from the suite of classes offered in Enterprise Service Planning. This class will offer you significant new insights into how to optimize the effectiveness of your business, to produce fit-for-purpose products and services that delight your customers, making them loyal to your brand and increasing your share, revenues and margins.

Learning Objectives

• Understand that all products or services have design, implementation and service delivery elements
• Learn how to identify and describe the design, implementation and service delivery elements
• Understand how to recognize and define or describe a customer purpose
• Learn how to segment your market based on customer purpose and that individual customers can occupy multiple segments based on their context and specific purpose given their circumstances
• Understand the two ways of learning your customers’ purposes: customer narrative relayed from frontline staff – “flying visually”; and using the F4P Card market research tool – “flying on instruments”.
• Understand the 4 types of metrics: Fitness Criteria (used to select your product or service in the market); general health indicators; improvement drivers and vanity metrics
• Understand that only fitness criteria are key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Learn how to correctly classify metrics
• Understand how to set objectives for each type of metric: fitness criteria have thresholds of acceptable performance and overserving; general health indicators have a range; improvement drivers have a target; while vanity metrics have an emotional need that may need addressed culturally and organizationally.
• Understand the 4 commonly recurring types of fitness criteria: Lead Time; Quality; Safety & Conformance; and Affordability.
• Recognize the 3 aspects of lead time (or time-to-market) as timeliness, predictability and duration, and learn how to describe them and when and how to recognize which is applicable.
• Understand the difference between functional and non-function requirements
• Learn how to describe and specify requirements in a measurable fashion
• Learn that price and affordability can be both an absolute independent variable, and a relative non-independent variable that changes with quality and lead time depending on the risks and purpose a customer has when consuming your product or service
• Learn how to construct customer questionnaires to solicit customer purpose and fitness criteria and levels of satisfaction.
• Learn how to report F4P Card surveys using the Fitness Box Score method
• Learn why a “Net Fitness Score” is not a desirable concept and should be avoided
• Learn how to analyze survey results and understand whether individual segments are underserved, appropriately served and “fit”, or overserved
• Learn how to classify segments into desirable and undesirable and how to take actions to improve or switch off segments that are underserved
• Learn and understand how segments can overlap and affect each other and how to avoid taking action for one segment that might damage adoption, sales or revenue in another segment
• Understand how Fit for Purpose integrates together with Net Promoter Score, Jobs To Be Done, Balanced Scorecard, OKRs, Goal-Directed Design/Personas

Who Should Attend?

This class is for executives and decision makers who set strategy and choose the portfolio of products and services offered. It is appropriate for anyone performing the following functions: strategic planning; strategic marketing; market research; product management; product design; service design; product ownership; and portfolio management. This class is useful for anyone who wants to understand how to set metrics in order to drive appropriate, congruent, aligned behavior in an organization and for those who wish to drive product and service improvement.

Prerequisites

There are no specific prerequisites for this class. It is recommended that attendees have a business background or a role in marketing, strategic planning or portfolio management. A business degree or formal qualification in business is not necessary but attendees with such a background may find the contrasts with familiar material to be either interest or challenging. Prior knowledge or experience with Net Promoter Score, Jobs to be Done, Balanced Scorecard, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) or Goal-Directed Design may also enhance the learning experience but is certainly not required.

Lean Kanban University® Certification

Students will receive a certificate of completion recognizing participation in the class.

Course Outline

Day 1:

The first day is focused on strategic issues and executive decision making. This provides the opportunity for executives to have the option to skip out at the end of the first day of the class

Agenda

• Understanding Customer Purpose and describing it
• Understanding Design, Implementation and Service Delivery elements in a product or service and developing the skill to describe and categorize them accurately

Break

• 4 Types of metrics: Fitness Criteria/KPIs; general health indicators; improvement drivers; vanity metrics
• Learn how to correctly classify them and set thresholds, ranges, targets or cultural and organizational goals to eliminate the need for unnecessary metrics.

Lunch

• 4 Commonly recurring fitness criteria: Lead time; Quality; Safety & Conformance; Affordability/Price

Break

• Understanding “flying visually” using front-line staff to gather and relate customer narrative, versus “flying on instruments” using surveys and data. 
• Overview of F4P Card surveys and the Fitness Box Score
• Discussion: Insights from today’s lessons. How will Fit for Purpose affect how you run your business? What will you change? How might you integrate the ideas with things you already do? What are the actionable, pragmatic ideas you are taking away and intend to implement?

Day 2:

The second day of the class focuses more on specific techniques and technical challenges. This is more suitable for practitioners in strategic planning, product management, service design and market research

Agenda

• Developing tighter requirements – defining fitness criteria
• Defining functional specifications with thresholds for minimal viable fitness for a segment
• Defining non-functional quality/fidelity requirements with thresholds
• Defining Lead Time (or time-to-market) requirements
• understanding timeliness
• understanding duration threshold levels
• understanding predictability and tolerance for variance and specifying it correctly

Break

• Developing tighter requirements – defining fitness criteria
• Understanding safety and conformance requirements as table stakes for market segment entry
• Understanding Affordability and Price
• When price behaves independently as a threshold to enable a segment
• When price varies with quality and lead time

Lunch

• Constructing a Fit for Purpose survey
• Analyzing Survey Results
• Underserved
• Appropriately Served (“fit”)
• Overserved
• Taking action on market segments
• Invest and improve
• Cut back, reduce costs
• Neutral
• Switch off

Break

• Customer narrative clustering exercise
• Integrations
• Balanced Scorecard
• Mission Command
• OKRs
• Goal-Directed Design
• Net Promoter Score
• Jobs To Be Done
• Closing Discussion

Class Materials

All students will receive a read only student edit of the classroom Powerpoint file, a copy of the 2nd Edition of the book, “Fit for Purpose – how modern businesses find, satisfy & keep customers” by David J. Anderson & Alexei Zheglov, and a printed copy of the Fit for Purpose Infographic poster.

Please read Term of Service.