We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Customers

Two thoughts (only two, that’s all I can handle on a Saturday) came to mind this afternoon. First, an experience I had with the advanced program that granted me my master’s degree. A couple of months ago I was delighted to share my experiences using Six Sigma for information technology with a class that was soon to graduate into the real world of technology. During the audio presentation which I conducted remotely from my home in Minnesota one master’s candidate asked about the “standard” sigma level for information technology. In response I suggested the answer would be apparent once I completed the entire presentation.

The second experience I’m pondering is an article I read in Computer World magazine this morning. In this article a reader shared his experience with a programmer who held to the philosophy that he didn’t need to ask the user or customer what they wanted or needed in their business application. It was this contractor’s perspective that he “told the customer what they needed” and had no intention of talking to the customer. Ouch! Yeah, the project fell short of customer expectations and the programmer was unceremoniously dismissed.

It’s exactly that attitude that I must deal with regularly. And it’s probably that perspective that brought about the question about the “standard” Six Sigma level for IT. Here’s the lesson: There is NO STANDARD. The challenge is to take the time to:
1. Understand your industry
2. Understand your competition
3. Incorporate the business requirements into the solution you are building
4. Achieve a performance level that meets your customer needs.

How do you do all this? Oh well, geeze! Maybe we have to “TALK TO THE CUSTOMER.” To understand the “appropriate sigma level” we need to understand our industry and how the business makes money in that industry. It can’t hurt to know what the business challenges might be, including the competition in the marketplace. As a process guy, I’m also going to suggest that perhaps you need a mechanism to capture these customer requirements (initially captured as CTQ’s -Critical To Quality) and be certain you can deliver against those. This isn’t rocket science (OK, if you work for NASA it is). It’s simply common sense.

My final admonition to the virtual class I was conducting was simple: “Lose the IT-centric attitude. It’s about the business - not IT.”