Tools & Templates

There are a number of great tips, tricks, and templates for introducing quality terms, materials, and methods to customers. Providing customers with easy to understand and use templates and tools will go far in helping engage them in to improve business processes. This SIPOC (Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer) Session Kit is one of them.

The project selection scorecard provides a systematic and data driven method for the identification and selection of projects. By leveraging an effective combination of information relating to resource availability, budget, mission alignment, and cost benefit you can ensure that the projects you select not only have have support from the start but actually benefit the organization when complete.

There are many instances where your customer requires a clearer picture of their requirements as well as a clearer picture of what your solution can do for them. Bringing in selected members of the implementation team to conduct a brief pre-sales requirements and solutions session with the customer helps ensure that future formal project charters and proposals are on the mark.

From CTQ's to Focus Groups, properly determining customer requirements is key to ensuring delivery of solutions that work for the customer. There are a variety of solutions and approaches out there that can help you as a consultant get to the heart of your customer's requirements. One of these is known as the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methodology.

When you need to present your technical support team (tech writing, training, and user support) to the rest of the business it's nice to have a well structured and thorough presentation ready. Here's a great example of one such presentation.

SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats) Analysis is a very powerful tool. It helps you uncover business opportunities that you are well placed to take advantage of and understand weaknesses in your business so you can manage and eliminate threats to success. By looking at your business and your competitors using the SWOT framework, you will start to develop a strategy that helps you differentiate yourself from your competitors and compete successfully in your market.

In the technology solutions sector, getting from initial client interest to the actual close of the sale requires proper "Alignment"

In order to achieve this alignment, solution providers need to engage their clients more from an "operational and process perspective" and less from the traditional sales perspective.

When putting together a project team or building a functional area it's helpful to have a clear picture of not only the team members but of their overall mission and the milestones they need to achieve in order to accomplish that mission. This MMM template works very well for this purpose and also provides an easy to use document for leadership to refer to.

Voice Of Customer is a process for capturing requirements and feedback from the customer (internal or external) in order to provide them with the best quality services and products.

This process focuses on being proactive and constantly innovating to capture the changing requirements of the customers with time. Voice Of Customer is the term used to describe the stated and unstated needs or requirements of the customer.

The "voice" of the customer can be captured in a variety of ways: Direct discussion or interviews, surveys, focus groups, customer specifications, observation, warranty data, field reports, complaint logs, etc. This data is used to identify the "quality attributes" needed for a supplied service or product.

The project charter one pager is a quick way to communicate your proposed project to the rest of the organization before work on the full detailed project charter gets under way. The project charter one pager also gives your leadership team a quick and easy snapshot to refer to.

Managing an effective technology operation requires not only well thought out technology systems, services, and processes. It also requires an agreement between the users of technology and business leadership. A good place to start is with an IT Policies and Procedures document that is reviewed and signed by each technology user in the organization.

Here's a good example of an IT Policies and Procedures document that covers not only computer usage but also telecommunication and other "technology" services.

A good project charter certainly helps set the stage for a successful client engagement. That said, there are a number of different project charter templates and approaches out there.

I have produced a checklist for my customers to refer to when reviewing the "project charters" they receive from their internal PM folks or from outside consultants. The project charter should answer important questions about many aspects of the project in terms of who, what, where, when, why, and how. This checklist helps outline for the customer just what questions a good charter needs to answer. I hope you agree that it's also a valuable tool when "building" the project charter. The last thing you want is to present your project charter to leadership and have them tell you it's missing key information.

Project Charter Completion Checklist.pdf
Pre Project Planning Grid.pdf
Project Charter One Pager.pdf

Stakeholder Management is an important discipline that successful professionals use to help win support from others to ensure that their projects succeed where others fail.

In addition to great trainers and training materials it's very important to properly set the stage for success by describing what you will deliver when it comes to training services. Your customer wants to know that you are prepared and they also want to look good in front of their peers. Take the time to not only prepare your training materials but to also prepare a pre-training walk through with your customer before you arrive at their location.

During the pre-training planning it's a great idea to have an actual training agenda to refer to with the customer so they have an idea of how the training will roll out. This also helps them line up the appropriate participant for each section of the training. Here's a sample technical training agenda for a 3 day engagement.

Prior to being engaged by your customer to develop and deliver training services you may be asked to walk them through a high level outline of your training preparation and delivery process. This one page outline diagram does a good job of clearly describing the high level steps.

The ability to Respond quickly and effectively to an RFP (Request for Proposal) or RFI (Request for Information) can make the difference between a successful and lucrative engagement and a laborious, painful, and morale degrading fire drill.

A well executed RFP/RFI response process not only maximizes your team's time and capabilities to produce a professional response, it also demonstrates to your potential customer that you actually "have a process" for properly responding to these requests. Remember, the way you execute your RFP/RFI response indicates to your customer just how you will approach and execute the engagement that you are competing for.

The ability to deliver according to pre-defined agreements increasingly becomes a competitive advantage and aside from being able to deliver highly available, reliably performing systems, just being able to deliver on your promise is key to your success. An efficient Service Level Management (SLM) system is very important and a primary component of such a system is a sound Service Level Agreement (SLA).

A good SLA helps the support/services organization promise what is possible to deliver and deliver what is promised. In this document, we establish what an SLA is and provide sample agreements and examples of how an agreement maps to key performance indicators.

How's Your Project Doing? - Measuring Project Status

In larger project management offices there is always a need to track the status of multiple projects simultaneously. In my experience, the key indicators for project status include adherence to budget, proper resourcing, adequate project document development, and proper use of tools. One way or another, consultants and customers needs to come to agreement on what constitutes "on track" with regard to their projects.

The first two weeks of most mid-sized (3-6 month) engagements are heavily focused on gathering detailed requirements from the customer and aligning your solutions with those requirements. This alignment must be clear, achievable, and agreed upon before actual development and delivery of solutions can take place. The Two Week Post-Sale Discovery Session kit provides a step by step road map for both you and the customer to refer to during this crucial early stage of the engagement.

From one hour meetings to full week long project kickoffs and solution sessions, your success will depend on properly planned and executed meeting and team member facilitation. The attached checklist has served me very well over the years for some pretty huge initiatives.

Here's a handy template describe planning and execution of Business Acquisition Due Diligence activities. This type of presentation works well for explaining how future Due Diligence activities will be handled as well as recapping to stakeholders after business due diligence activities have been completed.

Positioning your team members for success both within your practice and out in front of your customers is crucial. Making your team successful involves effective recruiting, team member on boarding, team member feedback, and team member review. I have included some FM tools and templates that continue to work for us very well.

We have conducted and participated in a number of technical and process discovery workshops over the years. The presentations that clearly articulate how the workshop engagement process works and what the customer can expect are very helpful in landing new business as well as properly executing on existing client engagements.

Many people are familiar with the term "Six Sigma" but don't really understand the methodology enough to have a decent conversation about it. Here's a quick reference document that outlines the high points of Six Sigma.

Collecting customer feedback both during and at the end of the engagement is essential. Here's a sample of a basic customer satisfaction survey form that you may find useful.

Building and delivering Human Resources related processes is no different than other functional areas of the business. In addition to finding, hiring, orienting, developing, and supporting people on a daily basis, HR departments need to define, refine and continue to grow their capability to deliver HR services and leadership in general.

The Process Area Report (PAR) sheet is an easy and fast way to provide updates to management and to the rest of your team.

Here's a handy one page grid that shows daily, monthly, and yearly engagement pricing based on a sliding hourly rate scale.

The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is a collection of processes and knowledge areas generally accepted as best practice within project management.

PMBOK provides the fundamentals of project management, whether it be construction, software, engineering, automotive etc...

By Thomas Pyzdek, Principal of Pyzdek Consulting, Inc. Tom holds more than 50 copyrights including the Six Sigma Handbook, The Quality Engineering Handbook and The Handbook of Quality Management. His works are used by thousands of universities and organizations around the world to teach process excellence. He has provided training and consulting to clients in all industries for over 23 years. He has worked in process excellence since 1967.