Consumer future needs projection is a method of analyzing consumer trends to anticipate consumer needs. The company times the release of the product/feature to the point when the customer will need the new product or feature. If the consumer needs are predicted accurately, the company will hold a competitive advantage. The new features it introduces will help the company’s industry evolve, and place that company ahead of it competitors while it maintains that advantage.

There are drawbacks to releasing new technology. One danger is that the new feature may not be supported by competitors’ technology. Breaking from ISO, W3C, or other standards guidelines makes it difficult for the feature to become accepted and adopted by competitors. Another danger is that the future needs projection could be wrong. By releasing a product too early, consumers are not ready to use the product. By releasing a product too late, consumers would have found another product to fit their needs. Either way, the sales will not be as robust as if the release of the product was properly timed.

I recently purchased a flat-panel monitor for my computer. When I got it home and plugged it in, I noticed one of the pixels in the middle of the screen was burned. It was a bright–green beacon in a sea of liquid crystal that affixed my gaze. No matter what was on my screen, I could not take my eyes off of this bright burned–out pixel. Naturally, I exchanged the monitor for another one, feeling slightly jilted that I had to take an extra trip to the store because the company had provided me with a defective monitor. I am not one for shopping in the first place, and having to return to the store to exchange the merchandise, and run the risk of getting another monitor with a different but amusing defect weighed heavily on my mind.

Acceptance sampling is a statistical procedure for accepting or rejecting a batch of merchandise. It is applied after it is produced and before it is used. This inspection can occur at the supplier’s side or the delivery side of the product. The acceptance quality level is determined on the supplier’s side. Acceptance quality level sampling is used to determine the producer’s risk of the product. The lot tolerance percent defective is the level of rejections on the delivery side of the product. Acceptance sampling is needed when the producer or consumer wants to limit the risk in sending or receiving an acceptable level of batch merchandise.

If the company that produced my monitor had had more through acceptance sampling, it might have saved me that extra trip to the store. Less gasoline would have been belched into the atmosphere, and this tainted memory would have been just a figment of my overactive imagination.

A moment–of–truth is a point when a customer expects an action from the service provider. If the service provider responds favorably, the customer is happy or at least satisfied. If the service fails, then there is potential for the customer to be upset. The moment–of–truth concept be used as a training tool for dealing with these fail points. If the service provider has backup procedures, or an alternate plan, these activities can mitigate the outcome. In a training scenario, the fail points can be discussed so that people can think through the ramifications of alternate responses. This training can help the team gain experience so that when a moment–of–truth moment occurs, the team has the practice of which response can best affect the situation.

ShoreShot! Web Design works with clients to produce sites that would not materialize if only one or the other party in the relationship was the sole producer. Let's take the discussion out of the web design-web page context to illustrate this point.

An example of customer co–production can be a person seeking legal defense. The person who gets deposed and placed on trial will seek legal defense services. The attorneys will do their best to implement legal backing in a client's defense. However, it is the client who gets deposed, or placed on the witness stand at trial.

The advantage for the service provider (i.e., the law firm) is that it is the client who is directly affected by the outcome of the decision. In the United States, the attorney does not endure the judgment passed in a legal case. However, the attorney is not immune to the track record of wins and losses for the duration of his or her practice. A service provider who has more wins for their clients than losses may have a distinguished area of legal expertise. However, since each attorney–client relationship is unique, the outcome is related to the performance of both the attorney and the client. There are several disadvantages for the service provider. The lawyer often does not pick and choose the clients depending on the details of the case. It can also take several years for some cases to go to trial. As such, it is tough for a law firm to plan legal defense teams for a client. There may be high turnaround in the staffing at the law firm, which makes retaining overall knowledge of the case that much more difficult. There will be trends of activity and inactivity in a case. Attorneys and legal assistants will be involved in many cases to manage their time effectively during low activity periods in a case. Involvement in multiple cases inevitably result in several cases becoming active at the same time, making the staff work harder, and often include the assistance of temporary help.

Continual improvement is necessary for a business organization to retain or increase its customer base. A constant cycle of Plan–Do–Check–Act is needed to assess the current method of production and improve it. Influences that motivate change include legal requirements, technology, and facilities. However, the people, whether through customer feedback, or research and development have the ability to affect the most change. As a result, the procedures to manage the change should coordinate the relationship between people and other resources in an organized manner. A well–coordinated quality system model will balance the needs of the customer, employee, and supplier, with the tools, equipment, technology, so that the system can incrementally adjust to the change.

Random variation is the term given when a process does not exactly meet specifications consistently. It is always uncontrollable. However, by controlling nonrandom variation, and determining process stability, we can increase the chances of processes meeting specifications.

For a production line, random variation could take the form of material purity, size, performance specifications. Controlling random variation would require developing tests to measure the quality and attributes of the composite parts before assembling them.

For a service-oriented business, random variation is inherent in practically every request. For a landscaper, weather is a random variation. Scheduling the mowing of lawns before it rains would be a method to accommodate for the variation, rather than to control such a variation as weather.

Routine work is a predictable repetition of well–understood tasks. It does not invite the workers to become involved in the decision–making process. Routine work could involve document cleanup, such as marking up documents for posting on the web. Knowledge work involves the workers by allowing them to think about how their tasks correlate with those of their coworkers. It is a lot more variable, as it deals with the interconnectedness of processes. However, it enables the workers to take more responsibility and ownership of their process so that it is more efficient for the overall practice. Knowledge work could involve the document cleanup people from the routine work example suggesting a document routing workflow that gathers documents from a variety of sources, automatically marks up some documents, flags other documents for manual cleanup, and sends a copy of the marked up document to the submitter for approval.

Cross–training is the process of teaching employees how to operate equipment, support an application or provide a service. It is used for backup support and mentoring. If the primary support contact is on vacation, s/he has one or more backups to support the operation(s) while s/he is gone. Cross–training should occur regularly providing updates to any substantive changes in process, so they can provide effective support. As the training sessions become more detailed, the backups get a more gestalt perspective of the processes and techniques in each other's area of expertise. This process has the added benefit of transplanting research and development (R&D) efforts from one support system to another without other employees having to undergo the same R&D in the other project.

The "Whack–a–Mole" analogy helps us understand the importance of organizational learning in a quality–focused organization. Whack-a-Mole is a game played in amusement parks. You get a soft mallet, and hit any robotic moles that pop up from various holes. The person who whacks the most moles in a round wins a prize. Whack-Mole at work refers to reacting to problems when they occur, as frantically as they arise.

Playing Whack–a–Mole at work is a result of task mismanagement. In effect you are spending more time reacting to errors in the production process than in initiating sound quality management practices. The time spent responding to errors detracts from using time proactively to improve the quality management process. By shifting your time to focus on quality techniques, the time needed to play Whack–a–Mole will be substantially reduced.

You cannot track what you don't measure. Recording statistics for your marketing campaign is the only way to know if it is successful or not. The best way to measure the results of a marketing campaign at first is to have only one campaign occurring at any given time. That way you can limit the factors contributing to your sales. Once you get more adept at tracking your marketing, you can develop more complex marketing strategies, but you must master the basic ones first.

One strategy is to use the marketing campaign to generate a contact list of your customers. This list should show what the customer buys and when so you can target future campaigns only to those customers who are inclined to participate in them. Amazon.com is a great example. They track not only your purchases, but the searches you run, and the items you view. This information is placed in a database that helps them profile you. The next page you visit on their site places advertising that you are more likely to view and possibly buy.

The elusive "paperless office" is a myth, states Scott Nesbitt. In the drive to create a paperless office, we have inevitably made it easier to place your ideas on paper. We can all do our part to reduce the amount of waste generated in this paperless office. Maybe the environment will spare us its wrath.

Whether intentionally or not, project management is doing its part to reduce its paper footprint on society. One of these ways is through a less formal approach to project management. Gone are the days of lengthy policy procedure manuals, guidelines, and life cycle documents. Who has time to read all of that anyway? Welcome, today's charts, graphs, and checklists. What was once told in lengthy tabular form is now summed up in a bar, line, or pie graph. The long-winded paragraphs have been replaced by punchy bullet lists.

The project management benefit is that information is transmitted in more succinct terms. Efficient communication takes the kernel of key information and puts it in an easily-digestible format. What will the trend be like in the next forty years of project management? Subscribe to this blog and we may discover it together.

So how do you retain that knowledge? One way is to create a "Best Practices" library. Documenting all of the tasks and all of the procedures into a single knowledgebase creates one of the most important tombs of intellectual property for your company.

Through evaluation and classification, your company collectively combs through all of its procedures to store in this library. Evaluation compares alternative methods of accomplishing tasks and defines which method is the preferred method to use for which circumstances. Classification is the process of defining categories for the information to be retrieved.

A benefit to this task is getting one step closer to ISO 9000 compliance in documenting all of your processes and procedures. But don't sit on your laurels for too long, because the information in this library is only good when it is current. Maintaining and updating this information is necessary for this library to stay pertinent to the values and goals of your business.

Knowledge transfer is critical for the success of your company. One of my managers hated the "hit by a bus" metaphor, and suggested "win the lottery" as a replacement. So if someone in your company "wins the lottery" and decides that day to quit working for you, can your organization survive?

All the tasks that that person did should be able to go to someone else. After all, a good employee is prompt, dependable, reliable, productive, efficient and replaceable. Knowledge is not something that should be kept to oneself. If that were the case, no one would know how much you know. When you share knowledge at work, it elevates the person imparting the knowledge as an expert, making you more of an asset to the company than the one who keeps his or her knowledge private.

One of the more challenging problems for me is the inability to say, "No," to requests. As a result, my schedule gets overloaded with additional work that someone else could or should perform. But I am turning things around by delegating more work to others who specialize in that area. The result is tasks need to be repeated, priorities change less often, time constraints become more reasonable, and reporting the status of a project is more accurate and occurs more often.

So if you find that you cannot complete your work, procrastinate, and rush around with nothing to show for your efforts, here is what you can do: Screen out the problems in which you do not want to get involved. Find the right person to take on that responsibility. (If you're nice, it is not given to another person who finds it hard to say, "No.") Share the responsibility. With time and practice, people will learn how to make their own decisions.

So what factors should go into a bid? The three tenets of a project are time, cost, and scope.

Time: How long will it take to complete the project? Calculate the time you expect it to take to complete the project. Adding staff (whether internal to your organization or contractors) usually brings the start date and end date of the project closer together. The staff will need training. They may require technical training, but they also need training on the scope and requirements of the project. If staff or contractors are brought in during the midst of the project, scope and requirements training should be bolster with a historical background of the project. When the staff know the expectations of the project, they can better lend their expertise to it.

Cost: Personnel, equipment, materials, and hidden costs all need to be justified to be factored into the cost estimate. If the assumptions about needing these elements are correct, then the cost estimate will be more accurate.

Scope: The project's requirements define the scope. They indicate the material and expertise needed to complete the job. If your company does not have the resources or expertise to be trained, some of these tasks may be subcontracted to other vendors. Know that the scope of the project may change or uncover some hidden factors. Due diligence in discovering these factors before placing the bid will help you determine the schedule, budget, and requirements. More importantly, it will help you know if you should even place the bid in the first place.

When a company bids on a project, it is based on best guesses, not concrete estimates. When the bidding is competitive, the chance of winning a bid is fairly low. Therefore, the effort spent on developing the bid is small. The result is companies not spending the necessary time to research the cost, time, and scope of the project.

Huge variances in scheduling, budgeting, and features will often bring unsatisfying results. The bottom line: If you like the adrenaline rush of working on a project that has more twists than a roller coaster, go with the competitive bid option. If you would like predictable, consistent results, build a long-term client/vendor relationship that will benefit you both.

There are two ways to find out what your customers think of your business: 1. Look at your accounting ledger. 2. Ask your customers.

Your accounting ledger will show you income and expenditures. If your income is greater than the expenses, then great! Keep up the good work. If not, you will have to find out whether the expenses have increased or income has decreased compared with previous months and previous years. Sit down with your accountant and find out where you can change your focus to bring your business back on the track to success.

Sending out surveys, talking to customers, encouraging feedback tells your customers that you care about them, and more importantly, you care about their opinions. Putting surveys on the back of coupons encourages your customers to provide feedback, and come back to your business to cash in that coupon. Talking to customers is slow and time consuming, but with good interviewing skills, you can follow-up on questions and get more in-depth answers than from surveys. Take the time and let the customers know you value your opinion.

Then act on their suggestions. Identify which suggestions fit with your current goals and objectives and implement them. Keep regular communication with the customers who provided suggestions to ensure that you have understood their meaning.

Your website will not work for you by itself. It is a marketing vehicle, not a destination. So now that your website has been built, here is how to get it working for you:

Meta tags help search engines categorize your website. No page should be without a Keywords and a Description tag. The Keywords tag is a list of possible searches that someone might use to find a page on your site. The Description tag can be a couple of sentences, or RE line for your page, that some search engines display in the search results. Tailoring these tags to each page will improve the relevance of the page to the search, while broadening the chance that one of your site's pages will display in the search results. These tags will give search engines more context to match searches with your content.

Register your website with search engines. Create a sitemap listing the pages you want the search engines to index. Get other websites to link to your website, and post articles to other websites that link to yours.

Does your website sell your message? Or does it oversell it?

Too much marketing hype in your copy can turn off readers. Adverbs are a prime target for trimming. Many intensifying adverbs can be identified with an "ly" ending. Does your copy still convey your meaning when you remove them from your sentences?

Excessive use of exclamation points!!!!! Exclamation points should be reserved to emphasize emotion. If many of your sentences end with this punctuation mark, the users cannot distinguish the fantastic statements from the detail.

Unnecessary qualifiers: Actually, however, in fact, to be honest, somehow. These qualifiers prompt readers to question the verisimilitude of the other sentences in your copy.