PDCA: Plan, Do, Check, Act

A four-stage model for continuous improvement in business process management, also know as the Deming circle/cycle/wheel after W. Edwards Deming. This is associated with Lean manufacturing, and is seen as iterable and separable.

Hoshin Kanri

7-step strategic planning process characterised by ongoing communication through the business. Wikipedia: “Companies that use Hoshin Kanri often follow a Think, Plan, Implement, and Review process, which is comparable to W. Edwards Deming’s Plan Do Check Act cycle.”

1. Establish organisational vision
2. Develop breakthrough objectives
3. Develop annual objectives
4. Deploy annual objectives
5. Implement annual objectives
6. Monthly review
7. Annual review

Catchball

First 4 phases, include socialised discussion of objectives across the business: making them acceptable through feedback, then creating implementation and cascading through the organisation. By making this an ongoing cycle, people are familiar with their objectives, rather than awaiting (and fearing) changes.

Hoshin Planning Matrix

Successful ESNs

From https://dionhinchcliffe.com/2017/03/02/what-we-know-about-making-enterprise-social-networks-successful-today/ 

There’s a lot to read, but Dion lists the top business cases:

• HR:
  • Continuous Performance Reviews, Social recruiting, People/expertise locator, new hire onboarding, social learning & development, HR knowledge base, digital line manager of the future, social talent management
• Sales:
  • Prospect research, lead scoring and distribution, RFP collaboration, forecasting and deal rooms, quota management, contracts and approvals, training and certification
• Marketing:
  • Employee advocacy, campaign management, content hub, social product catalogues, pre-sales community, digital focus groups, crowdsourced marketing,
• Service
  • Support Hub/KB, Support escalation/resolution, policy management, support advocacy programme, customer community, peer to peer support, customer service feedback

Collected notes on Office 365

Microsoft Teams

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/slack-v-ms-teams-rodney-guzman

Key points:

• Slack beats MS Teams “hands down” for working with external teams
• Suits a team-based collaboration model
• Risk of deleting a Team permanently
• Many connectors already available
• Multiple conversations can exist in a single channel
• Integration with OneNote > “team wiki”
• Easy to create meetings

(Via https://medium.com/@AGilleran/confused-about-microsoft-teams-office-365-groups-yammer-and-more-aa20dc46233c)

Justifying design

• Kara Pernice: Poor Management = Mediocre UX Design
  • Weak management support for UX and lack of UX leadership and role models correlate with unexceptional designs, according to data from 360 companies.
  • ST: not quite as exciting as the name suggests, but useful to refer to, especially when countering demands for great design without great understanding

Testing search

• Martin White CMSwire > The Ins and Outs of Search Application Testing
  • Testing search is a wicked (hard) problem
  • Challenges include:
    • Subjective results – some require a user’s judgement
    • Large base of users implies large range of expectations
    • Broad testing of filters and facets – billions of permutations
    • Fixing can take major recrawling
  • Suggestion: introduce User Satisfaction Testing
    • Requires planning / analysis / feedback