#QUALITYtweet The best practices are contextual – they
worked well for someone in a given context. Are you
applying them in the right context?
Imagine a doctor prescribing a standard medicine based on common symptoms without carefully analyzing other ailments and patient history. A doctor knows the best medicine to cure a particular ailment, but he would look at a patient’s context and then decide if the “best medicine” is really best for a particular patient.
Process managers play a role of doctors for the organizations. They have to identify all possible problems (symptoms) and then suggest a solution (medicine). Best medicines for different types of ailments are termed as “best practices” in business.
Best practices are a set of processes that, in a given context, have the best likelihood of delivering quality products or services. In equation of context identification, some of the variables are:
Your goals as an organization
Market segment you operate in
Your target customers
Nature of your product / services
Types of customer you already serve
Team capabilities and internal alignment
Management commitment and sponsorship to improvement initiatives
External market pressures (e.g. recession)
The list can go on. Best practices often tend to ignore these variables because they worked in past for someone in a particular context. Their context may be different, but never a static one. Implementing best practice without considering organization’s context is like prescribing a standard medicine without looking into symptoms. Both can be equally dangerous!
So how are best practices useful? Studying best practices can give you some very useful insights on possible solutions for your business challenge. They offer alternative perspectives on ideas that can minimize your risks.
For process improvement experts, having access to best practices can be their biggest asset. But their ability to apply those best practices in an organization’s context is absolutely mandatory for success. As a professional, there is no fun in having a best practice for everything and a solution for nothing!
As an organization, you can leverage best practices by carefully studying them and mapping with your unique business challenges. For this, improvement managers need to understand nuts and bolts of business. Once the context is understood, best practices can become your best guide so that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. Depending on context, you can either implement a best practice as it is or select portions of a best practice that can be most useful for your context.
Simply believing that a best practice will work for you just because it worked for someone else in the past and applying them in vacuum can harm you more than it can help.
There are no silver-bullets in business and things like context and innovation does play a huge role. As one of the Dilbert comic says – “If everyone is doing it, best practices is the same thing as mediocre”.
We all understand that customer is a priced asset. And most companies have tried to listen to the customer for forging innovation. The only caveat to this is – that how we have listened to the customer in the past is irrelevant now. There is new phenomenon that is emerging with social media. Pushing out “listening to them” campaigns alone is just not going to cut it. You need to adapt to the new skills to listen actively… and in doing so, you need to give up the old ways – because only the adaptive survive in the marketplace.
It is the recession that tests your listening skills. Many companies have suffered because they were not competent in listening to their customers – e.g GM, Linen N Things, Circuit City etc.
Here are some ways you can listen
1. Engage in a continual dialogue: A company needs to keep engaged through company’s own Web portals, blogs and experts’ blogs. The rising chorus of social network users (4 out 5 US adults online interacted with a social site in ‘09 – Forrester) continue to up the expectation for brands and companies with respect to presence and interaction online. The 24×7 consumer and social technologies have enabled new-media users with an ongoing interaction cycle that necessitates attention from brands.
2. React quickly. A new study that was just released from Cone reports claimed that among new-media users, a staggering 78% of them interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools — up from 59% the year before… and that these users are conversing with brands more often: 37% say they interact at least once a week — which is up from one in four when Cone did the study last year. There are huge quantities of information and opinion people distribute on the internet. You need to be able to collect and process this information and respond quickly to any feedback or misaligned information that could potentially hurt your brand.
3. Cut through the clutter: Segmentation and being knowledgeable about your target customer helps you understand exactly ‘who your customer is’. Their psychographic and demographic profiles can help you determine how to listen to them. Acknowledge the importance of cutting through the clutter to reach overloaded consumers.
Securing brand equity in the recession requires companies to add resources and capital to innovation and communication. This downturn will accelerate efforts of agile and smart companies to listen to consumers’ needs to keep their brands from slipping.
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Contributed by Deepika Bajaj, President and Founder, Invincibelle, LLC. Invincibelle helps women who live and work in a multicultural world to accelerate their professional growth.
Deepika is also the author of the book DiversityTweet: Embracing the growing diversity in our world.
You can follow Deepika on Twitter at invincibelle
Our world has been continually evolving. With the advent of globalization, technology and internet, we are now embarking on the phenomenal growth of the virtual worlds. So, what are Virtual Worlds? Virtual world is a real-time, multi-player 3D environments in which the user takes on a specific role, represented on screen by an avatar. Obvious example is SecondLife. People who live in virtual worlds can buy homes, go shopping and play games with friends – this is the social networking element of it. With the current economic recession, companies are finding it cost-effective to hold meetings, recruit candidates and do promotions in virtual worlds. Offline events require hotel, travel costs and lost time in productivity – so why not meet your potential clients, employees and colleagues virtually – Afterall they exist both in the real and virtual world.
Here is a brief intro of a what is a virtual world?
Where is the MONEY??
Virtual worlds reshape the real-life Retail:
With the rise in Virtual world, many small businesses are using it to interact with their customers. Many businesses are marketing their products and services in virtual worlds – you can hold events, do strategic placements for audience development and building relationships with their customers:
Where is my LOVE? Virtual worlds are all about experience and community.
Want a cool girlfriend? Who needs a real deal? She is exactly what you want and is gone when you log off.
Our world has expanded – it has multiple dimensions….ARE you present Virtually?
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Contributed by Deepika Bajaj, President and Founder, Invincibelle, LLC. Invincibelle helps women who live and work in a multicultural world to accelerate their professional growth.
Deepika is also the author of the book DiversityTweet: Embracing the growing diversity in our world.
You can follow Deepika on Twitter at invincibelle
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Tanmay is a Software Quality Management professional based out of India. He hosts QAspire Blog and tweets as @tnvora. He is also an author of the book #QUALITYtweet – 140 Bite-Sized Ideas to Deliver Quality in Every Project
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