The Need for Fit for Purpose

With recent announcements including a new Customer Experience Professional credential and updates to our Fit for Purpose poster, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the benefits that Fit for Purpose has to offer. Many students are quick to notice that our Fit for Purpose book and training seem to stand out in comparison to our more traditional Kanban training. At first glance, the training topic and material seem to stand alone. However, becoming Fit for Purpose is one of the most, if not the most, essential pieces needed to get the most benefits out a Kanban system. Here are a few ways understanding the Fit for Purpose framework can help you:

Focus

The biggest benefit to the Fit for Purpose framework is it gives you the ability to know where to focus your efforts and resources. Each customer has a purpose for choosing your service. They have a problem and they expect you to solve it. The Fit for Purpose framework was designed to help you easily discover your customers’ purpose. Maybe you have fully implemented a Kanban system and are delivering your services with top efficiency, however, if you do not understand your customer’s purpose, all of this work could be for nothing. The framework helps you focus your efforts instead on things that your customers want. This not only allows you to stop wasting time and resources but gives you the opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and sales.

Stop Wasting Time on Metrics that Don’t Matter

 It is easy to be distracted by useless metrics. Some make us feel good, for example, how many likes a certain post gets on Instagram. Some, such as surveys with scoring from 1-10, have good intentions but are lacking consistency that makes their measurements useful. With Fit for Purpose, valuable and actionable metrics are explained and easy to follow. They took a look at if your business is targeting what your customer’s needs are. The important thing here is to focus not on what you think your customers want, but instead the real reason that they seek you out. Important metrics also focus on health indicators as well as improvement drivers. These metrics help you to see weak areas of your business while painting you a clear path to improvement.

Feel Confident in Your Next Steps

So you have collected your data, now what? Many people get lost at this step not knowing how to act based on what their data tells them. The Fit for Purpose framework leads you to confident decision making. Strategy matrixes help you to know how and when to act on something. Market segmentation based on who your different customers are and why they chose you to help you orient your business to your customers’ needs.  It is possible that customers are indifferent or even don’t like products. The Fit for Purpose framework helps you see when something is actually an improvement.

Improvement with Kanban Principles

With the book and framework being co-authored by David J Anderson, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the Fit for Purpose framework is made for evolutionary change. By taking small steps and analyzing results, you are able to start where you are now and evolve with the framework. This happens through a series of “safe experiments” that you can roll back on if they prove to be unsuccessful. This allows you to use the Fit for Purpose framework to make improvements to your business with low risk and a high chance of success.

Interested in learning all the tips and tools involved with Fit for Purpose?

Join us for one of our upcoming training courses! Spend four half days with David J Anderson as you interact with peers in engaging activities and Q&A sessions. Enjoy hours of recorded video lectures by David as he thoroughly outlines the framework and practices. Take a look at our upcoming schedule to find the next available training: https://djasm.arlo.co/w/us/

Want to learn more? Check out some of our videos by experts: