Managers and analysts who develop and improve products, systems and processes increasingly manage activities in the tail of near-perfect delivery expectations and stunning complexity.  In addition to understanding the finance and quality contexts of their functions, they can manage the tail by simplifying processes and problems, reducing goals and options, optimizing within constraints and monitoring non-critical activities.

Simplify Processes and Problems

1. Modularize components to reduce the number of processes, flows and points of failure.  Reduce the points of contact between modules.
2. Incorporate self-testing features to make component outputs fail-safe (poke yoke).
3. Use a greater common denominator approach to combine options and provide just the higher value option.
4. Separate A, B, C and D volume/variability items into focused factory, modular production, job shop and true custom flows.  Move D volume processes completely out of the system if required.
5. Side-track complex evaluation steps to allow human expert consideration.
6. Require incompatible orders or requests to be split and handled separately.
7. Design processes to allow them to start again or reboot to eliminate truly random circumstances or operator error.

 

Reduce Goals and Options

1. Set a short-term level of imperceptible defects or same level as the competition.  Use this to guide short-run choices.
2. Reduce the number of customer goals from a dozen to six or two or one.  As demonstrated in Eli Goldratt’s book “The Goal”, this can simplify and motivate for long-run improvements.
3. Use marketing research and Pareto analysis to determine the limits of perceptible differences and material goals.
4. Incentivize customers to accept achievable goals and options by offering discounts, features, benefits and service.
5. Leverage IT, technical, safety and regulatory limits to reduce options.

 

Optimize Within Constraints

1. Set a project scope and resource budget.  Rank order initiatives and deliver within the time allowed.
2. Simulate processes to determine the probability of occurrence and use this to eliminate low-frequency events from analysis.
3. Apply best diagnosis practices for intermittent failures.  Set time limits.  Escalate to world-class experts. Set time and dollar limits.
4. Limit the complexity of the system to a one-page flow-chart.

 

Monitor Non-Critical Activities

1. Document future improvement options in a project parking lot.
2. Develop reports and processes to monitor known risk and problem areas to identify root causes or increased frequency of occurrence.

 

There are many other approaches used by experienced product developers, project managers and analysts.  The insights of each functional area can often be used in other functions.