You DO Make Widgets

As you strive to explain why your business is different, have you ever found yourself saying "We don't make widgets here!" Do you feel that your business is more complex, more demanding than the simple manufacture of products?

Especially in service organizations, the tendency is to think that production of a product is "so much simpler than what we do here!"

But the reality is that every organization makes widgets, every organization makes products, and products are the only things that you can provide to a customer.

A quality manager at BMW's South Carolina plant got it right when he said "Of the 58 products BMW creates at this plant, only three are vehicles. We also create Invoices, Purchase Orders, Plant Tours, Dealer Seminars, Audits, Phone Conversations, Warranty Claims ... everything we do results in a product, and every product has a customer."

When you define your output as a product, you can identify who your customer is for that specific product. Then, knowing that customer, you can start to become customer-focused, continually making your product better and better, from the customers' point of view.

So what are your products?

Robin Lawton of  International Management Technologies presents a useful model for identifying your products. A product must be:

• A deliverable [ie. must be a noun, not -ing]
• Very specific
• Packaged in countable units
• Made plural with an “s”

So, though you might be looking for coaching, coaching itself is not a product. Though coaching is a noun, nouns that end in -ing are not useful product definitions. You can't count the number of coachings and you can't make it plural with an "s" - "I would like three coachings please" doesn't make any sense.

So, the actual product you might be interested in is a weekly coaching session. You can count the number of coaching sessions, you can discuss what a productive coaching session might look like. You can define your expectations for a weekly session, and you can identify features and benefits you'd like to see in a coaching session.

As part of coaching, a followup call might be a related product. You can count the number of followup calls, and you can identify what makes a good followup call. Similarly for an agenda, an assigned task, a task list, or a productivity suggestion. These are all products.

To get you started thinking about the products you produce, about your widgets, consider this list:

Advertisements, Answers, Blueprints, Campaigns, Contracts, Courses, Decisions, Deliveries, Diagnoses, Greetings, Innoculations, Invoices, Interviews, Job Postings, Plans, Policies, Prescriptions, Procedures, Product Returns, Recipes, Repairs, Reports, Schedules, Shipments, Strategies, Surgeries, Visits,

Learning to think of your output as a product, or widget, can be very helpful on your path to improved productivity and improved quality.

You DO make widgets. Be proud of that!