This course is not currently offered by Global Knowledge. Information here is provided for reference only.

Today the emphasis is on service. Health care organizations, insurance agencies, investment brokers, and accountants sell services rather than products. But how do you know what your customer really wants? Traditionally, companies have assumed customer needs and expectations. Now successful companies need to actively solicit the customer's input, prioritize customer requirements, and apply this knowledge to their organization. These customer requirements can include ease of use, reliability, or response time that are sometimes difficult to measure.

In this course, you'll learn how to redefine customer quality requirements as measurable goals so they can drive process improvements. You will learn the different types of processes and how to break a process down into a sequence of activities and analyze the sequence for problems. You will learn who is responsible for managing process improvement, how to manage improvement effectively, and how to handle inherent process improvement problems. You'll also learn to set short-term improvement goals and acknowledge each milestone your organization achieves on the road to process perfection.

What You'll Learn

• Model for customer-driven process improvements
• Roles of senior and middle management in customer-driven process improvement
• Best practices for staying ahead of the fast-moving market
• Cross-functional quality improvement teams
• Understanding processes within your organization
• Resource management strategies
• Troubleshooting techniques for a failing improvement situation
• The right questions for the face-to-face interview

Who Needs to Attend

Managers at all levels, supervisors, staff members, team leaders

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Follow-On Courses

There are no follow-ons for this course.

Course Outline

1. Why Customer Driven?

• Listen to the Customer
  • Recognize the benefits of offering a product or service of exceptional quality in today's market
  • Identify the role of service in today's highly competitive market
  • Match the quality criteria categories to examples when given a specific product
  • Identify the steps that must be performed in order to discover the factors that are key to your product's success
• A Customer-Driven Process
  • Recognize the importance of letting customer need determine which processes should be improved
  • Choose the risks of internally focused process improvement
  • Sequence the broad steps in customer-driven process improvement
  • Choose the considerations for selecting a customer-driven process improvement
• A Model for Customer-Driven Process Improvements
  • Recognize the benefit of applying the customer-driven process model
  • Sequence the activities within the first activity block of the customer-driven process improvement model
  • Sequence the remaining steps within a customer-driven process improvement framework that are taken after identifying critical customer needs
  • Choose the correct order of activity blocks within the customer-driven process improvement model
• Management's Role
  • Recognize the benefits of understanding the role of management in customer-driven process improvement
  • Choose the responsibilities of senior management in customer-driven process improvement efforts
  • Identify the new requirements of middle management and employees caused by customer-driven process improvement
  • Identify the new demands that technology places on process improvement efforts

2. Identifying What the Customer Wants

• Defining Your Customers
  • Recognize the benefits of understanding the current market
  • Identify the best practices for staying ahead of the fast-moving market
  • Identify the features, functions, and outcomes of specific products
  • Match the customer to his particular role
• Capturing Your Customer's Voice
  • Recognize the importance of hearing and understanding the customer's voice
  • Recognize the difference between customer perceptions of product quality and customer perceptions of product features
  • Identify the best practices for capturing the voice of the customer
  • Choose the appropriate techniques to address customer complaints
• Asking Customers Directly
  • Recognize the value of obtaining direct customer feedback
  • Identify the effective questions to ask in a face-to-face interview
  • Identify the steps to use when performing a face-to-face survey
  • Identify the best methods to use to get direct customer feedback
• Rating Requirements by Importance
  • Recognize the importance of rating customer requirements
  • Identify the steps to use to create an affinity diagram
  • Sequence the steps of creating a tree diagram
  • Identify the most effective techniques to use when ranking customer input

3. Translating Requirements into Process Goals

• The Voice of the Customer
  • Recognize the benefits of understanding customer requirements
  • Differentiate between customer requirements and product features in business scenarios
  • Sequence the steps for creating a list of customer priorities
  • Match business situations to their appropriate competition-comparison techniques
• The Voice of the Engineer
  • Recognize the importance of distinguishing between the customer's voice and the engineer's voice
  • Match customer requirements to their corresponding technical descriptors
  • Choose technical descriptors that best convey customer requirements
  • Sequence the customer requirements in order of priority
• Processes
  • Recognize the benefits of analyzing company processes
  • Match the prioritized requirements to the corresponding organizational processes
  • Sequence the steps of process analysis to use in given business scenarios
  • Identify the examples of appropriate process improvement goals
• Cross-Functional Quality Improvement Teams
  • Recognize the value of creating a cross-functional team for process improvement
  • Identify the appropriate team roles for a process improvement team
  • Identify the criteria for team member selection
  • Select the appropriate expectations of management for a process improvement team

4. Understanding Processes

• Defining the Process
  • Recognize the importance of understanding processes within your organization
  • Match the process concepts to their definitions
  • Identify the examples of business processes
  • Differentiate between the vertical and the cross-functional processes
• Mapping the Process
  • Recognize the benefits of mapping business processes
  • Apply the block diagramming steps to the business processes
  • Apply simple flowcharting principles to the business processes
  • Apply functional flowcharting principles to a business process
• Participating in the Process
  • Recognize the importance of participating in a process walk-through
  • Identify the preparation steps necessary for a process observation
  • Use best practices for conducting a process walk-through in a business scenario
  • Differentiate between the occasional and the chronic process problems
• Analyzing the Process
  • Recognize the benefits of analyzing processes to assess process effectiveness
  • Use indicators for determining process success in business scenarios
  • Identify the methods to determine process cycle time
  • Identify the steps to determine process cost

5. Implementing Improvements

• Approaches
  • Recognize the value of different improvement approaches
  • Identify the approaches to process improvement
  • Identify examples of methods for continuous process improvement
  • Select the techniques that can be used to manage the change associated with process improvement
• Setting Up an Implementation Plan
  • Recognize the benefits of setting up an implementation plan
  • Identify the important aspects of an implementation strategy
  • Determine the appropriate process improvement success indicators in given situations
  • Select the best practices for creating a feedback system
• Implementation Tools
  • Recognize the benefits of using implementation tools
  • Identify the techniques for eliminating process bureaucracy
  • Match the type of value-added activity with the appropriate examples
  • Identify the methods to reduce process cycle time
• Managing the Implementation
  • Recognize the value of managing the implementation
  • Identify responsibilities of the process owner
  • Identify resource management strategies
  • Select the methods to manage the communication piece of implementation

6. Managing Process Improvements

• Who Manages Process Improvement?
  • Recognize the importance of process improvement management roles
  • Differentiate between process champion and process owner responsibilities
  • Identify process improvement team members' responsibilities
  • Identify responsibilities of team sponsors and project leaders
• How Is Improvement Managed?
  • Recognize the value of having process improvement levels
  • Differentiate among improvement levels
  • Analyze level requirements to make an improvement assessment in a given scenario
  • Determine the process improvement level based on improvement requirements in a given scenario
• How Can Improvements Continue?
  • Recognize benefits of continual process improvement
  • Apply benchmarking phases to the establishment of a benchmarking plan in a given scenario
  • Determine reasons for problems in process improvement scenarios
  • Identify appropriate continual improvement tools
• How Can Improvement Problems Be Handled?
  • Recognize the importance of handling improvement problems
  • Apply troubleshooting techniques to a failing improvement situation
  • Identify steps to re-energize process improvement
  • Apply troubleshooting techniques to personnel issues in a given scenario

7. Managing Customer-Driven Process Improvement Simulation

• Discovering and refining customers' subjective perceptions into concrete, quantitative terms
• Correctly classifying customer requirements using affinity and tree diagrams
• Applying proper methods to capture the customer's voice
• Calculating quantitative goals from the relationship matrix
• Examining and organizing customer feedback into an organized, central system
• Preparing and asking the right questions for the face-to-face interview
• Demonstrating preparation and neutrality through the interview process to understand what the customer truly wants
• Preparing the rank survey and ensuring efficient feedback
• Eliminating irrelevant data from the customer-driven process and narrowing solutions
• Remaining focused on the customers' needs and complaints
• Identifying and defining the three types of customers
• Refining process mapping of customer-driven process improvements