The technological process

Hi I'm Ed Muzio CEO from Harmonix.  I'm going to tell you about seven step problem solving. When your shoe's untied what do you do? If you're like me, you bend over and tie it.  Simple problem simple solution.  What if the problem is not so simple? What if your customer service center is overwhelmed with calls?.  Well, you might say simple problem simple solution, will implement some training they could take the calls faster and catch up . Of course the training takes them off the floor . Now you have a coverage problem, you can solve that by improving some overtime, but of course the overtime creates a budget problem. When you treat a complex problem like a simple one, you're likely to get caught in a loop where every solution creates another problem to avoid.

 Dr Shoji Shiva of the Center for quality of management to find what he called seven-step problem solving or seven steps to solve your problem, in a way that will benefit the whole organization as thoroughly as possible.  The first step is definition.  Definition asks the question what is the problem really.  So let's take our example of the customer service center.  Is the problem the number of calls? Is the problem how long the calls are taking? Is the problem something about the content of the calls?. What is the real problem?  Until you know that you can't go any further.  Now, let's say in this case we decide actually the problem is the number of calls. There seem to be more calls than there used to be now we move to step two.  

Step two is data collection.  Data collection answers the question of what is going on.  So if we're thinking about number of calls, let's look at a graph. Let's look at number of calls over time.  Maybe we determined that, yes in fact somewhere around june of last year the number of calls went up. Now we have some data, now we can move to step three.

Step three is cause analysis. Cause analysis of course, answers the question of why what's going on here. So we might go back up to this data, and we might say, you know what it turns out right at the same time, we had a new product introduced started shipping to the customer, and a lot of the calls are about that product.  Now we're getting somewhere, now we're ready for step four.

Step four is solution planning of implementation.  Now that's a lot of work in one line of writing.  This can take quite some time to plan a solution, well and to implement it. But the good news is you've done your homework. You know you're working on the right thing so it's worth the effort.  Now once you've planned and implemented, let's say in our case , we figured out we want to ship a new product checklist product that goes out.  We're going to send the customer the top five things they should do first.  Maybe, we think that will help them stop having to call for help but we're not going to stop there, we're going to do that for a while and then we're going to move to step 5.

Step five is evaluation of effects.  The question here is, did it work so maybe we do our new product checklist for a few months and then we go back to the data and we look at it again and we say did it go down.  If it didn't if the calls got went up again,  back to the drawing board but if we got the result we wanted if our solution worked, we're still not done then we move to step 6.

Step 6 is standardization. The idea of standardization is we've gone through a lot of work to get the solution, let's see how widely we can use it the organization.  So can we use it with other products, new ones that release from now on or old ones?.  Can we use it internally on the department's? Can we leverage it with partners somehow anything we can do to widely adopted earning that we worked so hard to get after standardization.

We're still not done.  There's one more step, and that's step 7 evaluation of the process.  Again the idea here is to learn something based on the work we've done.  When we started out, there probably one or two people that knew this was a problem, but over time putting a solution in place, certainly took a group.  We get this group together one more time, and we ask the question how do we do it solving this problem? what did we do well? what were the positives that we should repeat next time? what did we do poorly? what should we do differently next time?.  We take these learnings, and we take them forward with us. S o the next time we have a problem to solve, or that much better at doing it.  So the next time you have a problem to solve, if it's a complex problem don't get caught in the loop, where every solution is a new problem.  Instead, take the time to do seven step problem-solving: first define the problem, collect your data, analyze the cause,  that way you make sure you solve the right problem.  After you've done your solution, evaluate its effects and if it worked, standardized as widely as you can, and evaluate your process to learn for next time. It'll be more likely to come up with a solution that helps the company helps the problem and solves it once and for all.