Changing Requirements

16 Quality Digest/October 2007
Thomas Pyzdek
QUALITY2.0
Prior to the industrial revolution,
quality was defined aesthetically.
It was beauty, goodness, art. The
requirements were those of the user or
artist. They were as varied as the individuals
for whom they were created. There were
no quality professionals, only creators and
consumers.
Quality 1.0, which began in the late 18th
century, focused on consistently meeting
the requirements of a target customer
market. The emphasis was on reproducibility,
accuracy, and consistency. Quality
professionals came into existence. They
were tasked with identifying the customer’s
requirements, translating them into an
internal language called specifications,
and assuring conformance to these specifications.
The customer requirements that
concerned these professionals were what
Noriaki Kano, recipient of Japan’s Deming
Prize, termed “expected” and “must have”
requirements. These were the requirements
of which customers were consciously
aware.
While these tasks were challenging,
they pale by comparison to the new challenges
imposed by Quality 2.0. We must
now identify, translate, measure, and
assure conformance to the requirements
of all major stakeholders, not just those
of the customers. We must determine not
only those requirements that stakeholders
expect or insist on, we must also assure
that our offerings include new and exciting
features that will differentiate us from our
competitors for customers, employees,
and investors. These are “requirements”
that stakeholders aren’t even aware they
have. There have been many names for
this type of requirement, but I’ll use my
favorite: Wow requirements. Wow requirements
are features of products or services
that stakeholders didn’t ask for, but, once
experienced, they think, “Wow! I really
like this!”
Changing Requirements
Wow! Why didn’t I ask for this?
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Comments
So how do we go about identifying requirements
that stakeholders don’t know
they have?
One way has been around as long as
business itself: visionaries. Before Alexander
Graham Bell, no one really knew
that they wanted a telephone. Anyone can
be a visionary. Anyone can identify Wow
requirements simply by reflecting on the
humanity that they share with everyone
else. What would you love from your job?
Your investments? Your purchases? What
is there that you’d love that no one else
provides? Answers to these questions may
provide the germ of an idea for a Wow
requirement.
Another way to identify these requirements
is what Intuit Inc., creator of
Quicken and TurboTax software, calls
“follow me home.” This involves spending
time with customers (or groups that you
would like to have as your customers)
and carefully observing what they do.
How can you help them do it faster,
easier, cheaper, or more joyfully? What
problems do they have that you can make
disappear? What opportunities could they
exploit with your help?
The changes Quality 2.0 brings to
requirements has a major repercussion on
the quality professional’s role. In the past
the quality professional could pretty much
focus on two questions:

1. What are the customers’ requirements
2. Do our products and services conform

to the requirements?
In other words, the quality professional’s
role was passive. Marketing would identify
product requirements, engineering would
translate the requirements into specifications,
and manufacturing would create
products. It was assumed that engineering
made the proper translation. Quality assurance
began when manufacturing received
the engineering requirements. Quality
developed procedures to ensure that manufacturing
met the requirements.
In the future, the quality professional’s
role will be much more proactive. In
addition to being concerned with product
requirements, we will be expected to guide
the organization in obtaining stakeholder
requirements and measuring them in concrete
terms.
The organization pursues the leadership
vision by helping stakeholders meet
their various requirements. It does this
by pursuing strategies that are put into
operation via metrics for each stakeholder.
These metrics are monitored on balanced
scorecards. Metrics are divided into two
categories: key requirements and differentiators.
Key requirements are operational
metrics that must be competitive.
Differentiators are strategic metrics that
must be world-class. A dashboard is used
by the leadership to monitor differentiators
and those key requirements that are
dangerously noncompetitive. The dashboard
is used to drive operational plans
and to identify strategic change projects,
including Six Sigma projects. Leadership
monitors the dashboard carefully and
uses feedback from the dashboard to help
identify changes in strategies.
These activities are Quality 2.0 in a
nutshell. It is an exciting, challenging new
world for the quality professional.
About the author
Thomas Pyzdek, author of The Six
Sigma Handbook (McGraw-Hill, 2003),
provides consulting and training to clients
worldwide. He holds more than 50
copyrights and has written hundreds of
papers on process improvement. Visit him